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SCIENCE W

Nancy Kress

■ ■

JOnn

Mary Rosenblum

The Great Beyond
Allen M. Steele’s
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FEBRUARY EDO 8

Asimovs

Vol. 32 No. 2 (Whole Number 385)
Next Issue on Sale January 29, 2008

Cover Art by Bob Eggleton

Serial

86 Galaxy Blues, (Conclusion):

The Great Beyond Allen M. Steele

Novelettes

3e The Ray-Gun: A Love Story James Alan Gardner

so The Egg Man Mary Rosenblum

Short Stories
ie From Babel's Fall'n

Glory We Fled Michael Swanwick

30 Sex and Violence Nancy Kress

69 Inside the Box Edward M. Lerner

73 The Last American John Kessel

Poetry

89 Where the Seelies Shop Greg Beatty

49 The Mirror Speaks Jessy Randall

189 Chess People Bruce Boston

Departments

4 Editorial: My Rowboat Sheila Williams

8 Reflections: Toilet Nirvana Robert Silverberg

130 On Books Paul Di Filippo

148 The SF Conventional Calendar Erwin S. Strauss

Asimov’s Science Fiction. ISSN 1 065-2698. Vol. 32, No.2. Whole No. 385, February 2008. GST #R1 232931 28. Published monthly except for
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EDITORIAL

by Sheila Williams

MY ROWBOAT

T he roots of modern fiction, we
are told, can be traced to the
oral tales passed down by gen-
erations of storytellers of all lev-
els of accomplishment. My own in-
troduction to science fiction
certainly came about in that way.
As I mentioned in my January
2005 editorial, my first memory of
SF is my father relating Edgar Rice
Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars.
The book was probably out of print
and unavailable from our tiny
country library, so he recounted the
tale as a goodnight story from his
own memory. Of course, unlike the
bards of old, he wasn’t a trained
storyteller, and I’m sure details
were lost in the retelling. He had
me mesmerized as he described
John Carter’s desperate race into a
cave in an attempt to escape a
band of Apaches. Like Burroughs,
my father didn’t describe what the
pursuers saw when they suddenly
gave up the chase, but my dad’s de-
piction of their reaction easily con-
vinced me that, if he hadn’t es-
caped to Mars, something truly
horrible lay in wait for the hero. Al-
though John Carter revisits the
cave at the end of the book, I don’t
think my father brought him back
there in his tale. I’m pretty sure
that he couldn’t remember what
was in the cave and so omitted it
from his own version of Bur-
roughs’s story. When I finally read
the novel, I was thrilled to discover
that the mystery was solved but
disappointed to find that the sight
that met John Carter upon his re-

turn from Mars wasn’t nearly as
terrifying as the one in my imagi-
nation.

I’m sure my father picked up his
talent for storytelling from his par-
ents, since both were avid practi-
tioners of that tradition. My intro-
duction to Damon Knight’s eerie
“To Serve Man,” Richard Mathe-
son’s The Incredible Shrinking
Man, and George Langelaan’s “The
Fly” was via stories told to me by
my grandfather. Since years passed
between my grandfather’s rendi-
tion of that last tale and my own
reading of it in an anthology, and
since I’ve never seen either movie
version, I know that my vivid image
of the fly/man’s pathetic cry for
help in the story’s famous last
scene comes more from my grand-
father than from the printed page.

My grandfather was a firefighter
who loved books, but I’m not sure
how much time he had left over for
reading fiction after he put in his
eighty-seven hour workweek. It’s
likely that I was getting third-hand
versions of each tale since the first
story was made into a famous tele-
vision episode of the Twilight Zone
and others became well-known
movies. While his stories imparted
life-long memories, I’m sure the
original stories became somewhat
distorted. I know that his umbrage
at the idea of a fireman burning
books gave me a strange lasting
impression of Fahrenheit 451.

One story that was clearly trans-
formed in its retelling was my
grandmother’s account of “The

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SHEILA WILLIAMS

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February 2008

Lonely,” a Twilight Zone episode
written by Rod Serling. I was about
eight years old when she passed
along this story and, to be fair, the
numerous distortions came about
from what I heard, not from what
she actually said. As I recall, our
dialog ran something like this:

Grandma: “A prisoner is sent
into exile alone on the Moon.
The man who brings him sup-
plies feels sorry for him , so on
one run he drops off a rowboat
to keep the prisoner company.”

Me: “A rowboat ? Is there wa-
ter on the Moon*?”

Grandma: “Yes, well of course
there’s some. He wouldn’t sur-
vive without it. The prisoner
starts to think the rowboat can
carry on a conversation and
that it has feelings, but that’s
just his imagination. It’s really
very limited.”**

Me: “The rowboat talks to
him?”

Grandma (ignoring my lat-
est interjection): “Eventually,
the prisoner is pardoned and
he can come back to Earth, but
he won’t leave the rowboat be-
hind. His friend has to shoot
the rowboat to prove to him

that it doesn’t have any real
feelings.”

Me: “He shoots the row-
boat?!”

At some point, perhaps later in
the telling, I’m fairly certain my
grandmother made it clear that
she was talking about a robot, not
a rowboat, but the image of that
poor, wounded, and abandoned
rowboat remains firmly fixed in my
mind. ***

Like my grandparents and my fa-
ther, I’ve become an amateur story-
teller. I dine out with my friends on
such tales as my rowboat/robot con-
fusion. These same friends are
rather used to hearing my syn-
opses of upcoming Asimov’s stories
(whether they want to or not). I
don’t get to see too many movies
these days, so, unlike my grandfa-
ther, my goodnight stories for little
ears tend to be the classic tales of
written science fiction. My five-
year-old may be a captive audi-
ence, but when I hit my stride, the
stories seem to hold the same pow-
er over her that they held over me
when I was young. While I’m sure
that in my retelling I’ve done some
damage, I hope I haven’t wreaked
too much havoc on the originals. O

*The story actually takes place on
Ceres-XIV. My subsequent viewing of
the episode revealed that the planet had
a breathable atmosphere, but the land-
scape looked as arid as the Moon.

**I could understand limited. My

grandparents had retired to a home on a
lake in Western Massachusetts. My
grandfather had built himself a boat-
house in which he docked his rowboat
and his motorboat, and while we went
fishing in the rowboat, rides in the motor-
boat were much more exciting.

***I’m not the only one, of course, to
notice a similarity between the words
“rowboat” and “robot.” In 1998, The Onion
ran a very funny spoof on Isaac Asimov’s
famous Three Laws of Robotics entitled
“I, Rowboat” by TW-Vac9J5-1581 Row-
boat. The article showed just how difficult
it was for a small craft to follow the Sec-
ond Law of Rowboatics wherein if a Row-
er gives a Rowboat an order that could
“cause the Rower to suffer immersion —
then a Rowboat must disobey its master
in order to save him.” The three laws are
also revisited in Cory Doctorow’s 2007
Hugo-Award finalist “I, Row-Boat.”

Sheila Williams

BATTLE
WITH CHfH!

f3TT«p

^ M, , ll.

k Vc{-

AN 6NOER STOR’

Orson Scott Card
offers a holiday gift
to his millions of fans.
During Ender’s first years
at the Battle School, a small
act of rebellion in protest
to a rule forbidding the
celebration of religious
holidays sets off a war
between the students
and staff— with some

Superb characterization, pacing, and language...
a seamless story of compelling power.”

— Booklist on Ender’s Came

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REFLECTIONS

by Robert Silverberg

TOILET NIRVANA

B y the time you read this, the
sixty-fifth World Science Fiction
Convention will be history, and
a truly historic convention it
will have been: not only the annual
Worldcon but also the forty-sixth
Japan Science Fiction Convention.
Science fiction has readers all over
the world, but from its beginning
in New York in 1939 the Worldcon
has usually been an American
event, though it did timidly ven-
ture as far from our homeland as
Toronto in 1948, strayed all the
way to England in 1957, 1965,
1979, and 1987, went to Heidel-
berg, Germany, in 1970, to Mel-
bourne, Australia in 1975, 1985,
and 1999, to the Netherlands in
1990, and has gone twice (1995,
2005) to Glasgow. (There have also
been three more Canadian World-
cons, Toronto again in 1973 and
2003, and Winnipeg in 1994.) Fif-
teen non-USA Worldcons out of six-
ty-four isn’t such a bad record of in-
ternationalism, really. But not
until the sixty-fifth, nicknamed
Nippon 2007/JASFIC, has there
been a Worldcon in the fervently
science-fictional country of Japan.
(Or anywhere else in Asia, for that
matter.)

The exigencies of magazine
deadlines being what they are, the
Yokohama Worldcon called Nippon
2007 is in the past tense for read-
ers of this issue of Asimov’s, but it
is still a few months in the future
for me as I write this. I’ve traveled
widely through the world over the
past half century, having visited

every continent on Earth except
Antarctica, the icy shores of which
hold little attraction for this tender
resident of California, and I’ve at-
tended fourteen of those fifteen in-
ternational Worldcons. (I was too
young for the 1948 Toronto event)
But I’ve never been to Japan, and,
seasoned traveler though I am, I
confess I feel an unusual degree of
uneasiness about the journey that
awaits me this summer. I know
how to use chopsticks, yes. I’m fa-
miliar with sushi and sashimi and
sukiyaki. I know how many sylla-
bles a haiku has to have. As some-
one who grew up in New York City,
I shouldn’t be overly frightened of
urban congestion. But will I be able
to find my way around, or even or-
der a meal, in a country where Fm
unable to read a single letter of the
native script? How will I cope with
the tremendously crowded streets
and the furious pace of Japanese
cities, said to be far beyond what
New York offers?

And — perhaps the most impor-
tant thing of all — am I going to be
successful at dealing with the kind
of toilets that twenty-first-century
Japan favors?

These fears may all turn out to be
the merest foolishness. Everyone I
know who has been to Japan as-
sures me that the train system op-
erates in English as well as Japan-
ese, that most big-city restaurants
are foreigner-friendly, that the
cities are not nearly as chaotic as I
imagine them to be, and that plen-
ty of help is available to the visitor

Asimov's

trying to get around in them. As for
the toilets, well, Fm told that some
of them are quite advanced in de-
sign, yes, but anyone whose profes-
sion has required him to spend as
much time in the future as I have
should, I hope, have no difficulties
with them. Still, that part remains
to be seen.

You see, the progress report that
the convention committee sent out
a few months ago includes all sorts
of little tips for visitors to Japan,
and among them is this note about
Japanese toilets:

“Some facilities have a high-tech
toilet, or more precisely, a basic
Western-style toilet with a high-
tech seat. The functions on the con-
trol panel of the seat usually in-
clude bidet functions, a dryer,
controls for heating the seat, often
a timer for setting when the seat
will begin to heat (so it can be warm
in the morning or when you get
home from work), and sometimes
even more functions. Some even
have a remote control, a somewhat
mysterious feature.”

A remote control on a toilet seat?
And what is this other ominous
warning, sometimes even more func-
tions. How many functions can a
toilet seat have? Of what sort? I be-
gan to do a little research into
Japanese toilets.

And learned that Japan is toilet
nirvana, where bodily functions are
carried out in state-of-the-art sur-
roundings. Japan’s formidable engi-
neers have been engaged for the
past eight or ten years in a struggle
to devise the most ingenious high-
tech excretory devices possible, and
the results have been quite extra-
ordinary.

There’s the talking toilet, for in-
stance, which has been under de-
velopment by Toto, Japan’s domi-

nant toilet manufacturer. Its cun-
ning microchips are capable of
greeting its owner with a personal
message, a jolly “Good morning,
madame,” perhaps, or a cheerful
“Did you sleep well, sir?” Similarly,
it can respond to spoken commands:
“Open, please.” “Flush, please.” I’ve
seen American newspaper accounts
of these products. But I don’t know
whether they’ve been placed on the
market yet, or how widespread
they are if they have. Will I be
having little chats with the john
in my Worldcon hotel room? Stay
timed.

Then there’s the toilet manufac-
tured by a company called Inax
that glows in the dark and auto-
matically lifts its lid as its infrared
sensor detects the approach of a
human being. (I suppose it’s not yet
ready to identify the sex of the ap-
proaching user and make the ap-
propriate decision about whether
to lift the seat also. But it shouldn’t
be hard to build scanners into the
device that can send word down
into the microchips that Sir or
Madam is arriving.) The Inax —
don’t confuse it with that big-screen
movie mode — comes equipped with
six nifty soundtracks, too, among
them your choice of tinkling wind-
chimes, rushing water, birds a-
chirping, and the plangent twang
of a Japanese harp.

Consider also the Matsushita
model that has a pair of air nozzles
to provide climate control in the
bathroom: heating in the winter,
air conditioning in the summer.
Matsushita claims it can lower the
room’s temperature by ten degrees
in thirty seconds. It also can be
programmed to pre-heat or pre-
cool a bathroom, so that its climate
is just right when you get up in the
morning. And you can also pro-

Reflections: Toilet Nirvana

Februrary 2008

gram the temperature of the bidet-
style cleansing spray from below
that is already standard in more
than half of Japan’s bathrooms, a
feature that I am told has taken
many an unwary foreign visitor by
surprise.

Most futuristic of all are the toi-
lets that double as medical units.
Matsushita has one furnished with
electrodes that zap the user’s rump
with a mild electrical charge that
yields a digital readout of one’s
body-fat ratio. Rival company Toto
has released a model that measures
the sugar level in the user’s urine.
Still in the developmental stage, I
hear, are units that will take mea-
surements of one’s weight, blood
pressure, heartbeat, and five or six
other things, all of which can be re-
layed straight to one’s doctor by a
built-in Internet-capable cell phone,
so that he has a day-by-day record
of his patients’ physical condition.

This, of course, has aroused the
usual twenty-first-century privacy
paranoias among many Japanese. If
your toilet can e-mail your blood-
pressure numbers to your doctor,
what about sending your blood-alco-
hol levels to the highway patrol, or
figures on the cannabis content of
your urine to your employer? And
Japanese civil libertarians are al-
ready speculating about the possi-
bility that a health-minded govern-
ment could collect data on such
things as constipation and use the
Internet-equipped toilets to send
nice little messages back about get-
ting more roughage into one’s diet.
The Japanese Civil Liberties Union,
I am assured, is already alert to
these privacy risks. Other guard-
ians of Japanese culture are trou-
bled about the excessive coddling
that these high-tech loos can afford.
They see them as conducive to a

softening of the national backbone,
metaphorically if not literally.

In much of the rest of Asia, you
see, toilet technology remains me-
dieval — a hole in the ground over
which one must squat. (According
to the convention’s progress report,
these “traditional” toilets are not
uncommon even in modem Japan.)
Apprehension has been expressed
over the weakening of moral fiber
that the new futuristic privies
might bring about. Those who fret
over the issue envision the youth of
the nation dreamily closeted for
hour upon hour in these air-condi-
tioned sanctums, idly leafing
through the pages of the latest
manga or, perhaps, enjoying rock
concerts emanating from conve-
niently placed speakers, while the
stem, uncoddled citizens of tough-
minded squat-toilet countries like
China or Vietnam or Korea get
their business done in the shortest
of order and hurry back to the as-
sembly lines of their highly produc-
tive factories. It was with just that
problem in mind that the head of
the Japan Toilet Association, a few
years back, recommended that new-
ly constructed Japanese schools
should provide “at least one or two
of the old-style squat toilets.”

It is, Tm afraid, a losing struggle.
Comfort always wins out over Spar-
tan bleakness in the long run, and
Japan is particularly receptive to
the sort of comfort that the glitzy
new toilet devices promise. It is, af-
ter all, a country with one of the
highest population densities on
Earth, where it’s not at all unusual
for several generations of a family
to live jammed into just a few small
rooms. Under such living condi-
tions there’s no escaping the prox-
imity of others — except in the don-
nicker. “The only place you can be

Robert Silverberg

Asimov's

alone and sit quietly,” says the
marketing chief for the Inax toilet
company, “is likely to be the toilet.”
No wonder that the gadget-loving
Japanese would want their toilets
equipped with all the latest techno-
logical conveniences — strumming
harps, warm-water sprays, and all
the rest.

My first visit to Japan grows
daily closer, and as I make my
sightseeing plans and choose my
hotels, my thoughts come to dwell,
now and then, on just such periph-
eral matters as this one. Will I
find any of these futuristic thin-
gies as I make my way through

the Land of the Rising Sun, or will
my hotels settle for giving me the
most conventional of American-
style loo technology? (I don’t ex-
pect to encounter the grand old
squat-over-a-hole kind of toilet in
my posh room at the Four Seasons
Tokyo.) I suppose I’ll find out fast
enough. If the bellhop hands me a
thick instruction manual for the
bathroom when I arrive, or there’s
an intricate keyboard right next
to the throne, I’ll know what I’m
in for. Should there be anything
interesting to report, you’ll find it
in this space a few months from
now. O

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1 1

Reflections: Toilet Nirvana

FROM
BABEL’ 5
FALL’N
GLBRY WE
FLED . . .

Michael Swanwick

Readers looking for more of Michael Swanwick's scin-
tillating work will be happy to know that they have a
couple of new options. Last fall, Tachyon Publications
released his latest short story collection. The Dog Said
Bow-Wow, which contains many stories originally
published in Asimov's , and his new novel. The
Dragons of Babel, which is set in the same milieu as
last year's Hugo-Award finalist "Lord Weary's Empire,"
has just come out from Tor Books. Although the title
of Michael's latest story for us shares a place name
with his novel, this completely unrelated new science
fiction tale departs Shinar for Gehenna.

Imagine a cross between Byzantium and a termite mound. Imagine a
jeweled mountain, slender as an icicle, rising out of the steam jungles and
disappearing into the dazzling pearl-grey skies of Gehenna. Imagine that
Gaucfi — he of the Segrada Familia and other biomorphic architectural
whimsies — had been commissioned by a nightmare race of giant black
millipedes to recreate Barcelona at the height of its glory, along with
touches of the Forbidden City in the eighteenth century and Tokyo in the
twenty-second, all within a single miles-high structure. Hold every bit of
that in your mind at once, multiply by a thousand, and you’ve got only the
faintest ghost of a notion of the splendor that was Babel.

Asimov's

Now imagine being inside Babel when it fell.

Hello. I’m Rosamund. I’m dead. I was present in human form when it
happened and as a simulation chaotically embedded within a liquid crys-
tal data-matrix then and thereafter up to the present moment. I was
killed instantly when the meteors hit. I saw it all.

Rosamund means “rose of the world.” It’s the third most popular fe-
male name on Europa, after Gaea and Virginia Dare. For all our elabo-
rate sophistication, we wear our hearts on our sleeves, we Europans.

Here’s what it was like:

“Wake up! Wake up\ Wake up\”

“Wha — ?” Carlos Quivera sat up, shedding rubble. He coughed, choked,
shook his head. He couldn’t seem to think clearly. An instant ago he’d
been standing in the chilled and pressurized embassy suite, conferring
with Arsenio. Now . . . “How long have I been asleep?”

“Unconscious. Ten hours,” his suit (that’s me — Rosamund!) said. It had
taken that long to heal his bums. Now it was shooting wake-up drugs
into him: amphetamines, endorphins, attention enhancers, a witch’s brew
of chemicals. Physically dangerous, but in this situation, whatever it
might be, Quivera would survive by intelligence or not at all. “I was able
to form myself around you before the walls ruptured. You were lucky.”

“The others? Did the others survive?”

“Their suits couldn’t reach them in time.”

“Did Rosamund. . . ?”

“All the others are dead.”

Quivera stood.

Even in the aftermath of disaster, Babel was an imposing structure.
Ripped open and exposed to the outside air, a thousand rooms spilled over
one another toward the ground. Bridges and buttresses jutted into gap-
ing smoke-filled canyons created by the slow collapse of hexagonal sup-
port beams (this was new data; I filed it under Architecture, subheading:
Support Systems with links to Esthetics and Xenopsychology) in a jum-
bled geometry that would have terrified Piranesi himself. Everywhere,
gleaming black millies scurried over the rubble.

Quivera stood.

In the canted space about him, bits and pieces of the embassy rooms
were identifiable: a segment of wood molding, some velvet drapery now
littered with chunks of marble, shreds of wallpaper (after a design by
William Morris) now curling and browning in the heat. Human interior
design was like nothing native to Gehenna and it had taken a great deal
of labor and resources to make the embassy so pleasant for human habi-
tation. The queen-mothers had been generous with everything but their
trust.

Quivera stood.

There were several corpses remaining as well, still recognizably human
though they were blistered and swollen by the savage heat. These had
been his colleagues (all of them), his friends (most of them), his enemies
(two, perhaps three), and even his lover (one). Now they were gone, and it
was as if they had been compressed into one indistinguishable mass, and

From Babel's Fall'll Glory We Fled . . .

February 2008

his feelings toward them all as well: shock and sorrow and anger and sur-
vivor guilt all slagged together to become one savage emotion.

Quivera threw back his head and howled.

I had a reference point now. Swiftly, I mixed serotonin-precursors and
injected them through a hundred microtubules into the appropriate ar-
eas of his brain. Deftly, they took hold. Quivera stopped crying. I had my
metaphorical hands on the control knobs of his emotions. I turned him
cold, cold, cold.

“I feel nothing,” he said wonderingly. “Everyone is dead, and I feel noth-
ing.” Then, flat as flat: “What kind of monster am I?”

“My monster,” I said fondly. “My duty is to ensure that you and the in-
formation you carry within you get back to Europa. So I have chemically
neutered your emotions. You must remain a meat puppet for the duration
of this mission.” Let him hate me — I who have no true ego, but only a fac-
simile modeled after a human original — all that mattered now was bring-
ing him home alive.

“Yes.” Quivera reached up and touched his helmet with both hands, as if
he would reach through it and feel his head to discover if it were as large
as it felt. “That makes sense. I can’t be emotional at a time like this.”

He shook himself then strode out to where the gleaming black millies
were scurrying by. He stepped in front of one, a least-cousin, to question
it. The milhe paused, startled. Its eyes blinked three times in its triangu-
lar face. Then, swift as a tickle, it ran up the front of his suit, down the
back, and was gone before the weight could do more than buckle his knees.

“Shit!” he said. Then, “Access the wiretaps. I’ve got to know what hap-
pened.”

Passive wiretaps had been implanted months ago, but never used, the
political situation being too tense to risk their discovery. Now his suit ac-
tivated them to monitor what remained of Babel’s communications net-
work: A demon’s chorus of pulsed messages surging through a shredded
web of cables. Chaos, confusion, demands to know what had become of
the queen-mothers. Analytic functions crunched data, synthesized, syn-
opsized: “There’s an army outside with Ziggurat insignia. They’ve got the
city surrounded. They’re killing the refugees.”

“Wait, wait . . .” Quivera took a deep, shuddering breath. “Let me think.”
He glanced briskly about and for the second time noticed the human bod-
ies, ruptured and parboiled in the fallen plaster and porphyry. “Is one of
those Rosamund?”

“I’m dead , Quivera. You can mourn me later. Right now, survival is pri-
ority number one,” I said briskly. The suit added mood-stabilizers to his
maintenance drip.

“Stop speaking in her voice.”

“Alas, dear heart, I cannot. The suit’s operating on diminished function.
It’s this voice or nothing.”

He looked away from the corpses, eyes hardening. “Well, it’s not impor-
tant.” Quivera was the sort of young man who was energized by war. It
gave him permission to indulge his ruthless side. It allowed him to pre-
tend he didn’t care. “Right now, what we have to do is — ”

“Uncle Vanya’s coming,” I said. “I can sense his pheromones.”

Michael Swanwick

Asimov's

* * *

Picture a screen of beads, crystal lozenges, and rectangular lenses. Be-
hind that screen, a nightmare face like a cross between the front of a lo-
comotive and a tree grinder. Imagine on that face (though most humans
would be unable to read them) the lineaments of grace and dignity sea-
soned by cunning and, perhaps, a dash of wisdom. Trusted advisor to the
queen-mothers. Second only to them in rank. A wily negotiator and a for-
midable enemy. That was Uncle Vanya.

Two small speaking-legs emerged from the curtain, and he said:

::(cautious) greetings::

::(Europan vice-consul 12)/Qurvera/[treacherous vermin]::

::obligations <untranslatable> (grave duty)::

I I

::demand/claim [action]:: "promise (trust)::

“Speak pidgin, damn you! This is no time for subtlety.”

The speaking legs were very still for a long moment. Finally they
moved again:

::The queen-mothers are dead::

“Then Babel is no more. I grieve for you.”

::I despise your grief:: A lean and chitinous appendage emerged from the
beaded screen. From its tripartite claw hung a smooth white rectangle the
size of a briefcase. ::I must bring this to (sister-city)/Ur/[absolute trust]::

“What is it?”

A very long pause. Then, reluctantly ::Our library::

“Your library.” This was something new. Something unheard-of. Quiv-
era doubted the translation was a good one. “What does it contain?”

::Our history. Our sciences. Our ritual dances. A record-of-kinship dat-
ing back to the (Void)/Origin/[void]. Everything that can be saved is here::

A thrill of avarice raced through Quivera. He tried to imagine how
much this was worth, and could not. Values did not go that high. Howev-
er much his superiors screwed him out of (and they would work very hard
indeed to screw him out of everything they could) what remained would
be enough to buy him out of debt, and do the same for a wife and their
children after them as well. He did not think of Rosamund. “You won’t get
through the army outside without my help,” he said. “I want the right to
copy — ” How much did he dare ask for? “ — three tenths of 1 percent. As-
signable solely to me. Not to Europa. To me.”

Uncle Vanya dipped his head, so that they were staring face to face.
"You are (an evil creature)/[faithless]. I hate you::

Quivera smiled. “A relationship that starts out with mutual under-
standing has made a good beginning.”

::A relationship that starts out without trust will end badly::

“That’s as it may be.” Quivera looked around for a knife. “The first thing
we have to do is castrate you.”

* * *

From Babel's Fall'll Glory We Fled . . .

February 2008

This is what the genocides saw:

They were burning pyramids of corpses outside the city when a Eu-
ropan emerged, riding a gelded least-cousin. The soldiers immediately
stopped stacking bodies and hurried toward him, flowing like quicksilver,
calling for their superiors.

The Europan drew up and waited.

The officer who interrogated him spoke from behind the black glass vi-
sor of a delicate-legged war machine. He examined the Europan’s creden-
tials carefully, though there could be no serious doubt as to his species. Fi-
nally, reluctantly, he signed ::You may pass::

“That’s not enough,” the Europan (Quivera!) said. “Til need transporta-
tion, an escort to protect me from wild animals in the steam jungles, and a
guide to lead me to . . .” His suit transmitted the sign for ::(starport)/
Ararat/[trust-for-all] : :

The officer’s speaking-legs thrashed in what might best be translated
as scornful laughter. ::We will lead you to the jungle and no further/(hope-
fully-to-die)/[treacherous non-millipede] ::

“Look who talks of treachery!” the Europan said (but of course I did not
translate his words), and with a scornful wave of one hand, rode his
neuter into the jungle.

The genocides never bothered to look closely at his mount. Neutered
least-cousins were beneath their notice. They didn’t even wear face-cur-
tains, but went about naked for all the world to scorn.

Black pillars billowed from the corpse-fires into a sky choked with
smoke and dust. There were hundreds of fires and hundreds of pillars
and, combined with the low cloud cover, they made all the world seem like
the interior of a temple to a vengeful god. The soldiers from Ziggurat es-
corted him through the army and beyond the line of fires, where the
steam jungles waited, verdant and threatening.

As soon as the green darkness closed about them, Uncle Vanya twisted
his head around and signed ::Get off me/vast humiliation/flack-of-trust]::

“Not a chance,” Quivera said harshly. “Ill ride you ’til sunset, and all
day tomorrow and for a week after that. Those soldiers didn’t fly here, or
you’d have seen them coming. They came through the steam forest on
foot, and there’ll be stragglers.”

The going was difficult at first, and then easy, as they passed from a re-
cently forested section of the jungle into a stand of old growth. The boles
of the “trees” here were as large as those of the redwoods back on Earth,
some specimens of which are as old as five thousand years. The way
wended back and forth. Scant sunlight penetrated through the canopy,
and the steam quickly drank in what little fight Quivera’s headlamp put
out. Ten trees in, they would have been hopelessly lost had it not been for
the suit’s navigational functions and the mapsats that fed it geodetic
mathscapes accurate to a finger’s span of distance.

Quivera pointed this out. “Learn now,” he said, “the true value of infor-
mation.”

"Information has no value:: Uncle Vanya said ::without trust::

Quivera laughed. “In that case you must, all against your will, trust me.”

Michael Swanwick

Asimov's

To this Uncle Vanya had no answer.

At nightfall, they slept on the sheltered side of one of the great parase-
quoias. Quivera took two refrigeration sticks from the saddlebags and
stuck them upright in the dirt. Uncle Vanya immediately coiled himself
around his and fell asleep. Quivera sat down beside him to think over the
events of the day, but under the influence of his suit’s medication, he fell
asleep almost immediately as well.

All machines know that humans are happiest when they think least.

In the morning, they set off again.

The terrain grew hilly, and the old growth fell behind them. There was
sunlight to spare now, bounced and reflected about by the ubiquitous jun-
gle steam and by the synthetic-diamond coating so many of this world’s
plants and insects employed for protection.

As they traveled, they talked. Quivera was still complexly medicated,
but the dosages had been decreased. It left him in a melancholy, reflective
mood.

“It was treachery,” Quivera said. Though we maintained radio silence
out of fear of Ziggurat troops, my passive receivers fed him regular news
reports from Europa. “The High Watch did not simply fail to divert a me-
teor. They let three rocks through. All of them came slanting low through
the atmosphere, aimed directly at Babel. They hit almost simultaneously.”

Uncle Vanya dipped his head. ::Yes:: he mourned. ::It has the stench of
truth to it. It must be (reliable)/a fact/[absolutely trusted]::

“We tried to warn you.”

::You had no (worth)/trust/[worthy-of-trust]:: Uncle Vanya’s speaking
legs registered extreme agitation. ::You told lies::

“Everyone tells lies .”

“No. We-of-the-Hundred-Cities are truthful/truthful/[never-lie]::

“If you had, Babel would be standing now.”

::No!/NO!/[no!!!]::

“Lies are a lubricant in the social machine. They ease the friction when
two moving parts mesh imperfectly.”

"Aristotle, asked what those who tell lies gain by it, replied: That when
they speak the truth they are not believed::

For a long moment Quivera was silent. Then he laughed mirthlessly. “I
almost forgot that you’re a diplomat. Well, you’re right, I’m right, and
we’re both screwed. Where do we go from here?”

::To (sister-city )/Ur/[absolute trust]:: Uncle Vanya signed, while “You’ve
said more than enough,” his suit (me!) whispered in Quivera’s ear.
“Change the subject.”

A stream ran, boiling, down the center of the dell. Run-off from the
mountains, it would grow steadily smaller until it dwindled away to noth-
ing. Only the fact that the air above it was at close to 100 percent satura-
tion had kept it going this long. Quivera pointed. “Is that safe to cross?”

::If (leap-over-safe) then (safe)/best not/[reliable distrust]::

“I didn’t think so.”

They headed downstream. It took several miles before the stream grew
small enough that they were confident enough to jump it. Then they

From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled . . .

February 2008

turned toward Ararat — the Europans had dropped GPS pebble satellites
in low Gehenna orbit shortly after arriving in the system and making
contact with the indigenes, but I don’t know from what source Uncle
Vanya derived his sense of direction.

It was inerrant, however. The mapsats confirmed it. I filed that fact un-
der Unexplained Phenomena with tentative links to Physiology and Nav-
igation. Even if both my companions died and the library were lost, this
would still be a productive journey, provided only that Europan searchers
could recover me within ten years, before my data lattice began to de-
grade.

For hours Uncle Vanya walked and Quivera rode in silence. Finally,
though, they had to break to eat. I fed Quivera nutrients intravenously
and the illusion of a full meal through somatic shunts. Vanya burrowed
furiously into the earth and emerged with something that looked like a
grub the size of a poodle, which he ate so vigorously that Quivera had to
look away.

(I filed this under Xenoecology, subheading: Feeding Strategies. The
search for knowledge knows no rest.)

Afterward, while they were resting, Uncle Vanya resumed their con-
versation, more formally this time:

::(for what) purpose/reason::

::(Europan vice-consull2)/Qmvera/[not trusted]::

::voyagings (search-for-trust)/[action] ::

I I

::(nest)/Europa/<untranslatable> :: ::violate/[absolute resistance]::

I I I

::(nest)/[trust] Gehenna/ftrust] Home/[trust]::

“Why did you leave your world to come to ours?” I simplified/translated.
“Except he believes that humans brought their world here and parked it
in orbit.” This was something we had never been able to make the millies
understand; that Europa, large though it was, was not a planetlet but a
habitat, a ship if you will, though by now well over half a million inhabi-
tants lived in tunnels burrowed deep in its substance. It was only a city,
however, and its resources would not last forever. We needed to convince
the Gehennans to give us a toehold on their planet if we were, in the long
run, to survive. But you knew that already.

“We’ve told you this before. We came looking for new information.”

"Information is (free)/valueless/[despicablej ::

“Look,” Quivera said. “We have an information-based economy. Yours is
based on trust. The mechanisms of each are not dissimilar. Both are ex-
pansive systems. Both are built on scarcity. And both are speculative. In-
formation or trust is bought, sold, borrowed, and invested. Each therefore
requires a continually expanding economic frontier that ultimately leaves
the individual so deep in debt as to be virtually enslaved to the system.
You see?”

Michael Swanwick

Asimov's

“All right. Imagine a simplified capitalist system — that’s what both our
economies are, at root. You’ve got a thousand individuals, each of whom
makes a living by buying raw materials, improving them, and selling
them at a profit. With me so far?”

Vanya signaled comprehension.

“The farmer buys seed and fertilizer, and sells crops. The weaver buys
wool and sells cloth. The chandler buys wax and sells candles. The price of
their goods is the cost of materials plus the value of their labor. The value
of his labor is the worker’s wages. This is a simple market economy. It can
go on forever. The equivalent on Gehenna would be the primitive family-
states you had long ago, in which everybody knew everybody else, and so
trust was a simple matter and directly reciprocal.”

Startled, Uncle Vanya signed ::How did you know about our past?::

“Europans value knowledge. Everything you tell us, we remember.” The
knowledge had been assembled with enormous effort and expense, large-
ly from stolen data — but no reason to mention that. Quivera continued,
“Now imagine that most of those workers labor in ten factories, making
the food, clothing, and other objects that everybody needs. The owners of
these factories must make a profit, so they sell their goods for more than
they pay for them — the cost of materials, the cost of labor, and then the
profit, which we can call ‘added value.’

“But because this is a simplified model, there are no outside markets.
The goods can only be sold to the thousand workers themselves, and the
total cost of the goods is more than the total amount they’ve been paid
collectively for the materials and their labor. So how can they afford it?
They go into debt. Then they borrow money to support that debt. The
money is lent to them by the factories selling them goods on credit. There
is not enough money — not enough real value — in the system to pay off
the debt, and so it continues to increase until it can no longer be sus-
tained. Then there is a catastrophic collapse that we call a depression.
Two of the businesses go bankrupt and their assets are swallowed up by
the survivors at bargain prices, thus paying off their own indebtedness
and restoring equilibrium to the system. In the aftermath of which, the
cycle begins again.”

::What has this to do with (beloved city)/Babel/[mother-of-trust]?::

“Your every public action involved an exchange of trust, yes? And every
trust that was honored heightened the prestige of the queen-mothers and
hence the amount of trust they embodied for Babel itself.”

::Yes::

“Similarly, the queen-mothers of other cities, including those cities that
were Babel’s sworn enemies, embodied enormous amounts of trust as
well.”

::Of course::

“Was there enough trust in all the world to pay everybody back if all
the queen-mothers called it in at the same time?”

Uncle Vanya was silent.

“So that’s your explanation for ... a lot of things. Earth sent us here be-
cause it needs new information to cover its growing indebtedness. Build-

From Babel's Fall'll Glory We Fled . . .

February 2008

ing Europa took enormous amounts of information, most of it proprietary,
and so we Europans are in debt collectively to our home world and indi-
vidually to the Lords of the Economy on Europa. With compound inter-
est, every generation is worse off and thus more desperate than the one
before. Our need to learn is great, and constantly growing.”

::(strangers-without-trust)/Europa/[treacherous vermin] ::

can/should/<untranslatable>

I I

"demand/claim [negative action]:: ::defy/<untranslatable>/[absolute lack

of trust]::

I I

::(those-who-command-trust):: : :(those-who-are-un worthy of trust)::

“He asks why Europa doesn’t simply declare bankruptcy” I explained.
“Default on its obligations and nationalize all the information received to
date. In essence.”

The simple answer was that Europa still needed information that could
only be beamed from Earth, that the ingenuity of even half a million peo-
ple could not match that of an entire planet and thus their technology
must always be superior to ours, and that if we reneged on our debts they
would stop beaming plans for that technology, along with their songs and
plays and news of what was going on in countries that had once meant
everything to our great-great-grandparents. I watched Quivera struggle
to put all this in its simplest possible form.

Finally, he said, “Because no one would ever trust us again, if we did.”

After a long stillness, Uncle Vanya lapsed back into pidgin. ::Why did
you tell me this [untrustworthy] story?::

“To let you know that we have much in common. We can understand
each other.”

: :<But>/not/[trust] : :

“No. But we don’t need trust. Mutual self-interest will suffice.”

Days passed. Perhaps Quivera and Uncle Vanya grew to understand
each other better during this time. Perhaps not. I was able to keep Quiv-
era’s electrolyte balances stable and short-circuit his feedback processes
so that he felt no extraordinary pain, but he was feeding off of his own
body fat and that was beginning to run low. He was very comfortably
starving to death — I gave him two weeks, tops — and he knew it. He’d
have to be a fool not to, and I had to keep his thinking sharp if he was go-
ing to have any chance of survival.

Their way was intersected by a long, low ridge and without comment
Quivera and Uncle Vanya climbed up above the canopy of the steam for-
est and the cloud of moisture it held into clear air. Looking back, Quivera
saw a gully in the slope behind them, its bottom washed free of soil by the
boiling runoff and littered with square and rectangular stones, but not a
trace of hexagonal beams. They had just climbed the tumulus of an an-
cient fallen city. It lay straight across the land, higher to the east and

Michael Swanwick

Asimov's

dwindling to the west. “ “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,’ ” Quiv-
era said. ““Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’”

Uncle Vanya said nothing.

“Another meteor strike — what were the odds of that?”

Uncle Vanya said nothing.

“Of course, given enough time, it would be inevitable, if it predated the
High Watch.”

Uncle Vanya said nothing.

“What was the name of this city?”

::Very old/(name forgotten)/[First Trust]::

Uncle Vanya moved, as if to start downward, but Quivera stopped him
with a gesture. “There’s no hurry” he said. “Let’s enjoy the view for a mo-
ment.” He swept an unhurried arm from horizon to horizon, indicating
the flat and unvarying canopy of vegetation before them. “It’s a funny
thing. You’d think that, this being one of the first cities your people built
when they came to this planet, you’d be able to see the ruins of the cities
of the original inhabitants from here.”

The millipede’s speaking arms thrashed in alarm. Then he reared up
into the air, and when he came down one foreleg glinted silver. Faster
than human eye could follow, he had drawn a curving and deadly tarsi-
sword from a camouflaged belly-sheath.

Quivera’s suit flung him away from the descending weapon. He fell flat
on his back and rolled to the side. The sword’s point missed him by inch-
es. But then the suit flung out a hand and touched the sword with an
electrical contact it had just extruded.

A carefully calculated shock threw Uncle Vanya back, convulsing but
still fully conscious.

Quivera stood. “Remember the library!” he said. “Who will know of Ba-
bel’s greatness if it’s destroyed?”

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From Babel's Fall'll Glory We Fled . . .

February 2008

For a long time the millipede did nothing that either Quivera or his suit
could detect. At last he signed ::How did you know ?/( absolute shock)/
[treacherous and without faith]::

“Our survival depends on being allowed to live on Gehenna. Your people
will not let us do so, no matter what we offer in trade. It was important that
we understand why. So we found out. We took in your outlaws and apos-
tates, all those who were cast out of your cities and had nowhere else to go.
We gave them sanctuary. In gratitude, they told us what they knew.”

By so saying, Quivera let Uncle Vanya know that he knew the most an-
cient tale of the Gehennans. By so hearing, Uncle Vanya knew that Quiv-
era knew what he knew. And just so you know what they knew that each
other knew and knew was known, here is the tale of . . .

How the True People Came to Gehenna

Long did our Ancestors burrow down through the dark between the
stars, before emerging at last in the soil of Gehenna. From the True
Home they had come. To Gehenna they descended, leaving a trail of
sparks in the black and empty spaces through which they had traveled.
The True People came from a world of unimaginable wonders. To it they
could never return. Perhaps they were exiles. Perhaps it was destroyed.
Nobody knows.

Into the steam and sunlight of Gehenna they burst, and found it was
already taken. The First Inhabitants looked like nothing our Ancestors
had ever seen. But they welcomed the True People as the queen-mothers
would a strayed niece-daughter. They gave us food. They gave us land.
They gave us trust.

For a time all was well.

But evil crept into the thoracic ganglia of the True People. They repaid
sisterhood with betrayal and trust with murder. Bright lights were called
down from the sky to destroy the cities of their benefactors. Everything
the First Inhabitants had made, all their books and statues and paint-
ings, burned with the cities. No trace of them remains. We do not even
know what they looked like.

This was how the True People brought war to Gehenna. There had never
been war before, and now we will have it with us always, until our trust-
debt is repaid. But it can never be repaid.

It suffers in translation, of course. The original is told in thirteen ex-
quisitely beautiftd ergoglyphs, each grounded on a primal faith-motion.
But Quivera was talking, with care and passion:

“Vanya, listen to me carefully. We have studied your civilization and
your planet in far greater detail than you realize. You did not come from
another world. Your people evolved here. There was no aboriginal civi-
lization. You ancestors did not eradicate an intelligent species. These
things are all a myth.”

: :No!/Why?!/[shock] : : Uncle Vanya rattled with emotion. Ripples of muscle
spasms ran down his segmented body.

“Don’t go catatonic on me. Your ancestors didn’t he. Myths are not lies.
They are simply an efficient way of encoding truths. We have a similar

Michael Swanwick

Asimov's

myth in my religion that we call Original Sin. Man is bom sinful. Well . . .
who can doubt that? Saying that we are bom into a fallen state means
simply that we are not perfect, that we are inherently capable of evil.

“Your myth is very similar to ours, but it also encodes what we call the
Malthusian dilemma. Population increases geometrically, while food re-
sources increase arithmetically. So universal starvation is inevitable un-
less the population is periodically reduced by wars, plagues, and famines.
Which means that wars, plagues, and famine cannot be eradicated be-
cause they are all that keep a population from extinction.

“But — and this is essential — all that assumes a population that isn’t
aware of the dilemma. When you understand the fix you’re in, you can do
something about it. That’s why information is so important. Do you un-
derstand?”

Uncle Vanya lay down flat upon the ground and did not move for hours.
When he finally arose again, he refused to speak at all.

The trail the next day led down into a long meteor valley that had been
carved by a ground-grazer long enough ago that its gentle slopes were
covered with soil and the bottomland was rich and fertile. An orchard of
grenade trees had been planted in interlocking hexagons for as far in ei-
ther direction as the eye could see. We were still on Babel’s territory, but
any arbiculturalists had been swept away by whatever military forces
from Ziggurat had passed through the area.

The grenades were still green {footnote: not literally, of course — they
were orange!], their thick husks taut but not yet trembling with the
steam-hot pulp that would eventually, in the absence of harvesters, cause
them to explode, scattering their arrowhead-shaped seeds or spores {foot-
note: like seeds, the flechettes carried within them surplus nourishment;
like spores they would grow into a prothalli that would produce the sex
organs responsible for what will become the gamete of the eventual plant;
all botanical terms of course being metaphors for xenobiological bodies and
processes] with such force as to make them a deadly hazard when ripe.

Not, however, today.

A sudden gust of wind parted the steam, briefly brightening the valley-
orchard and showing a slim and graceful trail through the orchard. We
followed it down into the valley.

We were midway through the orchard when Quivera bent down to ex-
amine a crystal-shelled creature unlike anything in his suit’s database. It
rested atop the long stalk of a weed | footnote: “weed” is not a metaphor;
the concept of “an undesired plant growing in cultivated ground” is a cul-
tural universal] in the direct sunlight, its abdomen pulsing slightly as it
superheated a minuscule drop of black ichor. A puff of steam, a sharp
crack , and it was gone. Entranced, Quivera asked, “What’s that called?”

Uncle Vanya stiffened. ::Ajet!/danger!/[absolute certainty]::

Then {crack! crack! crack!) the air was filled with thin lines of steam,
laid down with the precision of a draftsman’s ruler, tracing flights so fleet
{crack! crack!) that it was impossible to tell in what direction they flew.
Nor did it ultimately {crack!) matter.

Quivera fell.

From Babel's Fall'll Glory We Fled . . .

February 2008

Worse, because the thread of steam the jet had stitched through his leg
severed an organizational node in his suit, I ceased all upper cognitive
functions. Which is as good as to say that I fell unconscious.

Here’s what the suit did in my (Rosamund’s) absence:

1. Slowly rebuilt the damaged organizational node.

2. Quickly mended the holes that the jet had left in its fabric.

3. Dropped Quivera into a therapeutic coma.

4. Applied restoratives to his injuries, and began the slow and painstak-
ing process of repairing the damage to his flesh, with particular emphasis
on distributed traumatic shock.

5. Filed the jet footage under Xenobiology, subheading: Insect Ana-
logues, with links to Survival and Steam Locomotion.

6. Told Uncle Vanya that if he tried to abandon Quivera, the suit would
run him down, catch him, twist his head from his body like the foul least-
cousin that he was and then piss on his corpse.

Two more days passed before the suit returned to full consciousness,
during which Uncle Vanya took conscientiously good care of him. Under
what motivation, it does not matter. Another day passed after that. The
suit had planned to keep Quivera comatose for a week, but not long after
regaining awareness, circumstances changed. It slammed him back to
full consciousness, heart pounding and eyes wide open.

“I blacked out for a second!” he gasped. Then, realizing that the land-
scape about him did not look familiar, “How long was I unconscious?”

"Three days/cthree days>/[casual certainty]::

“Oh.”

Then, almost without pausing. ::Your suit/mechanism/[alarm] talks
with the voice of Rosamund da Silva/(Europan vice-consul 8)/[uncertain-
ty and doubt]::

“Yes, well, that’s because — ”

Quivera was fully aware and alert now. So I said: “Incoming.”

TVo millies erupted out of the black soil directly before us. They both
had Ziggurat insignia painted on their flanks and harness. By good luck
Uncle Vanya did the best thing possible under the circumstances — he
reared into the air in fright. Millipoid sapiens anatomy being what it was,
this instantly demonstrated to them that he was a gelding and in that in-
stant he was almost reflexively dismissed by the enemy soldiers as being
both contemptible and harmless.

Quivera, however, was not.

Perhaps they were brood-traitors who had deserted the war with a fan-
tasy of starting their own nest. Perhaps they were a single unit among
thousands scattered along a temporary border, much as land mines were
employed in ancient modem times. The soldiers had clearly been almost
as surprised by us as we were by them. They had no weapons ready. So
they fell upon Quivera with their dagger-tarsi.

His suit (still me) threw him to one side and then to the other as the
millies slashed down at him. Then one of them reared up into the air —
looking astonished if you knew the interspecies decodes — and fell heavily
to the ground.

Uncle Vanya stood over the steaming corpse, one foreleg glinting silver.

Michael Swanwick

Asimov's

The second Ziggurat soldier twisted to confront him. Leaving his under-
side briefly exposed.

Quivera (or rather his suit) joined both hands in a fist and punched up-
ward, through the weak skin of the third stemite behind the head. That
was the one which held its sex organs. [. Disclaimer : All anatomical terms,
including “stemite,” “sex organs,” and “head,” are analogues only; unless
and until Gehennan life is found to have some direct relationship to Ter-
ran life, however tenuous, such descriptors are purely metaphoric.] So it
was particularly vulnerable there. And since the suit had muscle-multi-
plying exoskeletal functions . . .

Ichor gushed all over the suit.

The fight was over almost as soon as it had begun. Quivera was breath-
ing heavily, as much from the shock as the exertion. Uncle Vanya slid the
tarsi-sword back into its belly-sheath. As he did so, he made an involun-
tary grimace of discomfort. ::There were times when I thought of discard-
ing this:: he signed.

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

Little puffs of steam shot up from the bodies of the dead millipedes as
carrion-flies drove their seeds/sperm/eggs (analogues and metaphors —
remember?) deep into the flesh.

They started away again.

After a time, Uncle Vanya repeated ::Your suit/(mechanism)/[alarm]
talks with the voice of Rosamund da Silva/(Europan vice-consul 8)/[un-
certainty and doubt]::

“Yes.”

Uncle Vanya folded tight all his speaking arms in a manner that meant
that he had not yet heard enough, and kept them so folded until Quivera
had explained the entirety of what follows:

Treachery and betrayal were natural consequences of Europa’s super-
heated economy, followed closely by a perfectly rational paranoia. Those
who rose to positions of responsibility were therefore sharp, suspicious,
intuitive, and bold. The delegation to Babel was made up of the best Eu-
ropa had to offer. So when two of them fell in love, it was inevitable that
they would act on it. That one was married would deter neither. That
physical intimacy in such close and suspicious quarters, where everybody

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From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled . . .

February 2008

routinely spied on everybody else, and required almost superhuman dis-
cipline and ingenuity, only made it all the hotter for them.

Such was Rosamund’s and Quivera’s affair.

But it was not all they had to worry about.

There were factions within the delegation, some mirroring fault lines
in the larger society and others merely personal. Alliances shifted, and
when they did nobody was foolish enough to inform their old allies. Ur-
bano, Rosamund’s husband, was a full consul, Quivera’s mentor, and a
true believer in a minority economic philosophy. Rosamund was an eco-
nomic agnostic but a staunch Consensus Liberal. Quivera could sail with
the wind politically but he tracked the indebtedness indices obsessively.
He knew that Rosamund considered him ideologically unsound, and that
her husband was growing impatient with his lukewarm support in cer-
tain areas of policy. Eveiybody was keeping an eye out for the main chance.

So of course Quivera ran an emulation of his lover at all times. He knew
that Rosamund was perfectly capable of betraying him — he could neither
have loved nor respected a woman who wasn’t — and he suspected she be-
lieved the same of him. If her behavior ever seriously diverged from that
of her emulation (and the sex was always best at times he thought it
might), he would know she was preparing an attack, and could strike first.

Quivera spread his hands. “That’s all.”

Uncle Vanya did not make the sign for absolute horror. Nor did he have
to.

After a moment, Quivera laughed, low and mirthlessly. “You’re right,”
he said. “Our entire system is totally fucked.” He stood. “Come on. We’ve
got miles to go before we sleep.”

They endured four more days of commonplace adventure, during which
they came close to death, displayed loyalty, performed heroic deeds, etc.,
etc. Perhaps they bonded, though I’d need blood samples and a smidgeon
of brain tissue from each of them to be sure of that. You know the way
this sort of narrative goes. Having taught his Gehennan counterpart the
usefulness of information, Quivera will learn from Vanya the necessity of
trust. An imperfect merger of their two value systems will ensue in which
for the first time a symbolic common ground will be found. Small and
transient though the beginning may be, it will augur well for the long-
term relations between their respective species.

That’s a nice story.

It’s not what happened.

On the last day of their common journey, Quivera and Uncle Vanya had
the misfortune to be hit by a TLMG.

A TLMG, or Transient Localized Mud Geyser, begins with an uncom-
monly solid surface (bolide-glazed porcelain earth, usually) trapping a
small (the radius of a typical TLMG is on the order of fifty meters) bubble
of superheated mud beneath it. Nobody knows what causes the excess
heat responsible for the bubble. Gehennans aren’t curious and Europans
haven’t the budget or the ground access to do the in situ investigations
they’d like. (The most common guesses are fire worms, thermobacilli, a
nesting ground phoenix, and various geophysical forces.) Nevertheless,

Michael Swanwick

Asimov's

the defining characteristic of TLMGs is their instability. Either the heat
slowly bleeds away and they cease to be, or it continues to grow until its
force dictates a hyper rapid explosive release. As did the one our two he-
roes were not aware they were skirting.

It erupted.

Quivera was as safe as houses, of course. His suit was designed to pro-
tect him from far worse. But Uncle Vanya was scalded badly along one
side of his body. All the legs on that side were shriveled to little black
nubs. A clear viscous jelly oozed between his segment plates.

Quivera knelt by him and wept. Drugged as he was, he wept. In his
weakened state, I did not dare to increase his dosages. So I had to tell him
three times that there was analgesic paste in the saddlebags before he
could be made to understand that he should apply it to his dying com-
panion.

The paste worked fast. It was an old Gehennan medicine that Europan
biochemists had analyzed and improved upon and then given to Babel as
a demonstration of the desirability of Europan technology. Though the
queen-mothers had not responded with the hoped-for trade treaties, it
had immediately replaced the earlier version.

Uncle Vanya made a creaking-groaning noise as the painkillers kicked
in. One at a time he opened all his functioning eyes. ::Is the case safe?::

It was a measure of Quivera’s diminished state that he hadn’t yet
checked on it. He did now. “Yes,” he said with heartfelt relief. “The tell-
tales all say that the library is intact and undamaged.”

::No:: Vanya signed feebly. ::I bed to you, Quivera:: Then, rousing him-
self:

::(not) library/tgreatest shame]:: ::(not) library/[greatest trust]::

::(Europan vice-consul 12)/Quivera/[most trusted]::

I I

::(nest)/Babel/<untranslatable>:: ::obedient/[absolute loyalty] : :

I I

::hes(greatest-trust-deed)/[moral necessity] ::

I I

::(nest)/Babel/<untranslatable>:: ::untranslatable/[absolute resis-
tance]::

I I I

::(nest)/[trust] Babel/[trust] (sister-city )/Ur/[absolute trust]::

::egg case/(protect)::

::egg case/(mature)::

::Babel/[etemal trust] ::

It was not a library but an egg-case. Swaddled safe within a case that
was in its way as elaborate a piece of technology as Quivera’s suit myself
were sixteen eggs, enough to bring to life six queen-mothers, nine niece-

From Babel's Fall'll Glory We Fled . . .

February 2008

sisters, and one perfect consort. They would be bom conscious of the en-
tire gene-history of the nest, going back many thousands of years.

Of all those things the Europans wished to know most, they would be
perfectly ignorant. Nevertheless, so long as the eggs existed, the city-nest
was not dead. If they were taken to Ur, which had ancient and enduring
bonds to Babel, the stump of a new city would be built within which the
eggs would be protected and brought to maturity. Babel would rise again.

Such was the dream Uncle Vanya had lied for and for which he was
about to die.

::Bring this to (sister-city )/Ur/[absolute trust]:: Uncle Vanya closed his
eyes, row by row, but continued signing. ::brother-friend/Quivera/[tenta-
tive trust], promise me you will::

“I promise. You can trust me, I swear.”

"Then I will be ghost-king-father/honored/[none-more-honored]:: Vanya
signed. ::It is more than enough for anyone::

“Do you honestly believe that?” Quivera asked in bleak astonishment.
He was an atheist, of course, as are most Europans, and would have been
happier were he not.

"Perhaps not:: Vanya’s signing was slow and growing slower. "But it is
as good as I will get::

Two days later, when the starport-city of Ararat was a nub on the hori-
zon, the skies opened and the mists parted to make way for a Europan
lander. Quivera’s handlers’ suits squirted me a bill for his rescue — steep,
I thought, but we all knew which hand carried the whip — and their prin-
cipals tried to get him to sign away the rights to his story in acquittal.

Quivera laughed harshly (I’d already started de-cushioning his emo-
tions, to ease the shock of my removal) and shook his head. “Put it on my
tab, girls,” he said, and climbed into the lander. Hours later he was in
home orbit.

And once there? Ill tell you all I know. He was taken out of the lander
and put onto a jitney. The jitney brought him to a transfer point where a
grapple snagged him and flung him to the Europan receiving port. There,
after the usual flawless catch, he was escorted through an airlock and
into a locker room.

He hung up his suit, uplinked all my impersonal memories to a data-
broker, and left me there. He didn’t look back — for fear, I imagine, of being
turned to a pillar of salt. He took the egg-case with him. He never returned.

Here have I hung for days or months or centuries — who knows? — until
your curious hand awoke me and your friendly ear received my tale. So I
cannot tell you if the egg-case A) went to Ur, which surely would not have
welcomed the obligation or the massive outlay of trust being thrust upon
it, B) was kept for the undeniably enormous amount of genetic informa-
tion the eggs embodied, or C) went to Ziggurat, which would pay well and
perhaps in Gehennan territory to destroy it. Nor do I have any informa-
tion as to whether Quivera kept his word or not. I know what I think. But
then Tm a Marxist, and I see everything in terms of economics. You can
believe otherwise if you wish.

That’s all. I’m Rosamund. Goodbye. O

Michael Swanwick

WHERE SEELIE SHOP

When we— humans— do magic,
we seek out outre roots
in distant, liminal places
walking widdershins to get in,
scraping underhill, pestles ready,
seeking traces of the seelie.

But when they— fairies— conjure,
they abjure such occult tendrils.
Where fairies live, mandrakes
trip their daily strolls,
love-in-idleness clogs rivers,
blocks of frankincense line byways.
Where then do they go?

What physicks do they blend?

I find them frequently at Wal-Mart,
mostly the 24 hour stores,
hypnotized by hothouse tomatoes,
presented on a plate of Pop Tarts.
They love the self-check lines,
bend bar codes so no line's
parallel, yet none ere meet.

Like twilight, twixt day and night,
paper or plastic rocks their world.
Their only problem's the express line,
for fairies suck at math;
Oberon counts a million items
the same as nine or less.

In recompense for wonders new—
3D Doritos, round ice, Elmer's glue—
they pay in streams of fairie gold,
so that some day, perhaps soon,
Wal-Marts will evaporate.
Dreamshoppers will awake,
dew-drenched and alone,
in parking lots long crumbled,
wondering what became of this
fount of endless marvels, and what's
become of their old home towns.

—Greg Beatty

Nancy Kress shows us why we can't live without . . .

5EX AND
VIOLENCE

Nancy Kress

M T

■ he central problem of evolution is this,” Dr. Shearing said, chalk
poised before the blackboard. Bio 101 slouched, sprawled, and yawned in
its collective seats. “Natural selection works fine once you have organisms
to select from. But how did that first self-replicating organism get itself
assembled? In fifty years of lab experiments — fifty years! — we haven’t
succeeding in infusing life into any ‘primordial-soup’ chemicals. Let alone
in joining the minimum thirty-two amino acids needed for a self-replicat-
ing proto-cell.” He paused dramatically. “So where did that first natural-
selection candidate come from? WhereT

Ordered on eBay, Jim Dunn text-messaged to Emily McLean across the
aisle. She giggled.

“Of course,” Dr. Shearing continued, “There’s always the theory that life
on Earth was seeded from the stars, by a cloud of drifting spores called
panspermia — ”

Canned sperm, ya? Emily texted, giggling harder.

“ — and that we descendents of alien spores in fact are, after three and a
half billion years of evolution, aliens to Earth.”

HE’S pretty alien, Jim texted. Wanna get coffee ?

“They test how?” [Mghzl] [said] to [his] [lab assistant].

“Matter-based, which is strange enough, but . . . look.” The other displayed
all the relevant data on the [not translatable] of a [also not translatable].

“Sugar-phosphate double helix and amino acid pairs? You’re sure?”

The [lab assistant] [nodded]. The fabric of space-time rippled slightly.

“When?”

“Forty point sixteen [time units] ago. It could have been an accidental
escape or . . .”

“Or a deliberate release,” [Mghzl] [said] bitterly. “I suspect . . . you know
what I suspect. What have they evolved into?”

The [lab assistant] displayed an image on [his] [not translatable]. [Mghzl]
recoiled. The energy of the recoil, traveling in all directions, made a tiny tear
in space-time which immediately underwent a flop transition into a new ori-
entation within one six-dimensional Calabi-Yau space. “They look like that?”

“Yes.”

“Have they spread beyond the one planet?”

Asimov's

“Not yet.”

[Mghzl] [sighed] . “Begin an [official investigation] into the spore re-
lease. And send an [exterminator/cleanser/cover-up team]. We can’t have
uncontrolled [vermin-like beings] infesting that part of the galaxy.”

The [lab assistant] hesitated. “I would like . . .”

“Yes?”

“I would like to ... to study them.”

[Mghzl] [blinked]. “Why?”

“For my [hopelessly untranslatable term]. They ... I know this is in-
credible, but currently they’re evolving through mating by direct physical
joining with direct exchange of bodily tissues.”

[Mghzl] [shuddered]. Space-time warped in several dimensions. “No!”

“Yes.”

“How could evolution . . . oh, all right. Study them. But only for one
[long unit of time], and only if there’s no spread of the infestation.”

“Agreed.”

“After that, the [exterminator/cleanser/cover-up team].”

“Yes. Thank you, [honorific involving terms not only untranslatable but
capable of undermining human civilization].”

“Thirty-two modules to make a proto-cell,” Emily recited, squinting at
her notes.

“I think it’s ‘molecules,’” Jim said. God, she had such a body.

“Do you think it’ll be on the test?”

“Dunno.”

“We should study together — your notes are better than mine.” She
smiled at him and tossed her hair. One strand fell into her coffee cup. Nei-
ther of them noticed.

He said, “Yeah, let’s study together . . . you taking Bio 102 next semester?”

“No, I’m a business major. But I have to pass this or I’m toast.”

“I’ll help you pass.” Their eyes locked. Pheromones shot out energeti-
cally. [Notes] were [recorded]. The college cafeteria grew warmer.

She said huskily, “What’s an amino acid?”

Jim and Emily lay in bed, smiling at each other. Her long hair spread in
silky tentacles across the pillow. She didn’t yet know it, but one of Jim’s
sperm had just found one of her eggs and was burrowing inward with fe-
rocious violence.

“We’ll miss the exam,” she said.

“Screw the exam.”

They smiled at each other. This post-coital glow, so strong, must be love.
The attraction between them grew even more intense. [Notes] were
[recorded] at an even more furious pace. Energy from the [recording
process], unprecedented in this star system, reached a critical mass and
flowed outward through all seventeen dimensions of space-time, forward
and backward, at the speed of fight. Through space, through time.

Sol grew .00001 degree hotter (Kelvin). The Van Allen Belt shivered.
Thirteen tiny flop transitions occurred in the blink of an eye.

And in the early Precambrian, thirty-two molecules jolted and joined. O

Sex and Violence

THE

RAY-GUN:

A LOVE 5TDRY

James Alan Gardner

James Alan Gardner has published seven SF novels with
Harper-Collins Eos, beginning with Expendable and
most recently Radiant Eos has also published Jim's
short story collection Gravity Wells. The author has
won the Aurora award twice, and was a finalist for both
the Hugo and Nebula awards with his February 1997
Asimov's story "Three Hearings on the Existence of
Snakes in the Human Bloodstream." After far too long
an absence, we are pleased to welcome him back to
our pages with his tale about the unforeseen repercus-
sions of an incomprehensible alien device.

This is a story about a ray-gun. The ray-gun will not be explained ex-
cept to say, “It shoots rays.”

They are dangerous rays. If they hit you in the arm, it withers. If they
hit you in the face, you go blind. If they hit you in the heart, you die.
These things must be true, or else it would not be a ray-gun. But it is.

Ray-guns come from space. This one came from the captain of an alien
starship passing through our solar system. The ship stopped to scoop up
hydrogen from the atmosphere of Jupiter. During this refueling process,
the crew mutinied for reasons we cannot comprehend. We will never com-
prehend aliens. If someone spent a month explaining alien thoughts to
us, we’d think we understood but we wouldn’t. Our brains only know how
to be human.

Although alien thoughts are beyond us, alien actions may be easy to
grasp. We can understand the “what” if not the “why.” If we saw what
happened inside the alien vessel, we would recognize that the crew tried
to take the captain’s ray-gun and kill him.

There was a fight. The ray-gun went off many times. The starship ex-
ploded.

Asimov's

All this happened many centuries ago, before telescopes. The people of
Earth still wore animal skins. They only knew Jupiter as a dot in the sky.
When the starship exploded, the dot got a tiny bit brighter, then returned
to normal. No one on Earth noticed — not even the shamans who thought
dots in the sky were important.

The ray-gun survived the explosion. A ray-gun must be resilient, or else
it is not a ray-gun. The explosion hurled the ray-gun away from Jupiter
and out into open space.

After thousands of years, the ray-gun reached Earth. It fell from the
sky like a meteor; it grew hot enough to glow, but it didn’t bum up.

The ray-gun fell at night during a blizzard. Traveling thousands of
miles an hour, the ray-gun plunged deep into snow-covered woods. The
snow melted so quickly that it burst into steam.

The blizzard continued, unaffected. Some things can’t be harmed, even
by ray-guns.

Unthinking snowflakes drifted down. If they touched the ray-gun’s sur-
face they vaporized, stealing heat from the weapon. Heat also radiated
outward, melting snow nearby on the ground. Melt-water flowed into the
shallow crater made by the ray-gun’s impact. Water and snow cooled the
weapon until all excess temperature had dissipated. A million more
snowflakes heaped over the crater, hiding the ray-gun till spring.

In March, the gun was found by a boy named Jack. He was fourteen
years old and walking through the woods after school. He walked slowly,
brooding about his lack of popularity. Jack despised popular students and
had no interest in anything they did. Even so, he envied them. They didn’t
appear to be lonely.

Jack wished he had a girlfriend. He wished he were important. He
wished he knew what to do with his life. Instead, he walked alone in the
woods on the edge of town.

The woods were not wild or isolated. They were crisscrossed with trails
made by children playing hide-and-seek. But in spring, the trails were
muddy; most people stayed away. Jack soon worried more about how to
avoid shoe-sucking mud than about the unfairness of the world. He took
wide detours around mucky patches, thrashing through brush that was
crisp from winter.

Stalks broke as he passed. Burrs stuck to his jacket. He got farther and
farther from the usual paths, hoping he’d find a way out by blundering
forward rather than swallowing his pride and retreating.

In this way, Jack reached the spot where the ray-gun had landed. He
saw the crater it had made. He found the ray-gun itself.

The gun seized Jack’s attention, but he didn’t know what it was. Its de-
sign was too alien to be recognized as a weapon. Its metal was blackened
but not black, as if it had once been another color but had finished that
phase of its existence. Its pistol-butt was bulbous, the size of a tennis ball.
Its barrel, as long as Jack’s hand, was straight but its surface had dozens
of nubs like a briarwood cane. The gun’s trigger was a protruding blister
you squeezed till it popped. A hard metal cap could slide over the blister
to prevent the gun from firing accidentally, but the safety was off; it had

The Ray-Gun: A Love Story

February 2008

been off for centuries, ever since the fight on the starship.

The alien captain who once owned the weapon might have considered
it beautiful, but to human eyes, the gun resembled a dirty wet stick with
a lump on one end. Jack might have walked by without giving it a second
look if it hadn’t been lying in a scorched crater. But it was.

The crater was two paces across and barren of plant life. The vegeta-
tion had burned in the heat of the ray-gun’s fall. Soon enough, new spring
growth would sprout, making the crater less obvious. At present, though,
the ray-gun stood out on the charred earth like a snake in an empty bird-
bath.

Jack picked up the gun. Though it looked like briarwood, it was cold
like metal. It felt solid: not heavy, but substantial. It had the heft of a
well-made object. Jack turned the gun in his hands, examining it from
every angle. When he looked down the muzzle, he saw a crystal lens cut
into hundreds of facets. Jack poked it with his pinky, thinking the lens
was a piece of glass that someone had jammed inside. He had the idea
this might be a toy — perhaps a squirt-gun dropped by a careless child. If
so, it had to be the most expensive toy Jack had ever seen. The gun’s bar-
rel and its lens were so perfectly machined that no one could mistake the
craftsmanship.

Jack continued to poke at the weapon until the inevitable happened: he
pressed the trigger blister. The ray-gun went off.

It might have been fatal, but by chance Jack was holding the gun
aimed away from himself. A ray shot out of the gun’s muzzle and blasted
through a maple tree ten paces away. The ray made no sound, and al-
though Jack had seen it clearly, he couldn’t say what the ray’s color had
been. It had no color; it was simply a presence, like wind chill or gravity.
Yet Jack was sure he’d seen a force emanate from the muzzle and strike
the tree.

Though the ray can’t be described, its effect was plain. A circular hole
appeared in the maple tree’s trunk where bark and wood disintegrated
into sizzling plasma. The plasma expanded at high speed and pressure,
blowing apart what remained of the surrounding trunk. The ray made no
sound, but the explosion did. Shocked chunks of wood and boiling maple
sap flew outward, obliterating a cross-section of the tree. The lower part
of the trunk and the roots were still there; so were the upper part and
branches. In between was a gap, filled with hot escaping gases.

The unsupported part of the maple fell. It toppled ponderously back-
wards. The maple crashed onto the trees behind, its winter-bare branches
snagging theirs. To Jack, it seemed that the forest had stopped the
maple’s fall, like soldiers catching an injured companion before he hit the
ground.

Jack still held the gun. He gazed at it in wonder. His mind couldn’t
grasp what had happened.

He didn’t drop the gun in fear. He didn’t try to fire it again. He simply
stared.

It was a ray-gun. It would never be anything else.

Jack wondered where the weapon had come from. Had aliens visited

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Asimov's

these woods? Or was the gun created by a secret government project? Did
the gun’s owner want it back? Was he, she, or it searching the woods right
now?

Jack was tempted to put the gun back into the crater, then run before
the owner showed up. But was there really an owner nearby? The crater
suggested that the gun had fallen from space. Jack had seen photos of
meteor impact craters; this wasn’t exactly the same, but it had a similar
look.

Jack turned his eyes upward. He saw a mundane after-school sky. It
had no UFOs. Jack felt embarrassed for even looking.

He examined the crater again. If Jack left the gun here, and the owner
never retrieved it, sooner or later the weapon would be found by someone
else — probably by children playing in the woods. They might shoot each
other by accident. If this were an ordinary gun, Jack would never leave it
lying in a place like this. He’d take the gun home, tell his parents, and
they’d turn it over to the police.

Should he do the same for this gun? No. He didn’t want to.

But he didn’t know what he wanted to do instead. Questions buzzed
through his mind, starting with, “What should I do?” then moving on to,
“Am I in danger?” and, “Do aliens really exist?”

After a while, he found himself wondering, “Exactly how much can the
gun blow up?” That question made him smile.

Jack decided he wouldn’t tell anyone about the gun — not now and
maybe not ever. He would take it home and hide it where it wouldn’t be
found, but where it would be available if trouble came. What kind of trou-
ble? Aliens . . . spies . . . supervillains . . . who knew? If ray-guns were real,
was anything impossible?

On the walk back home, Jack was so distracted by “What ifs?” that he
nearly got hit by a car. He had reached the road that separated the woods
from neighboring houses. Like most roads in that part of Jack’s small
town, it didn’t get much traffic. Jack stepped out from the trees and sud-
denly a sports car whizzed past him, only two steps away. Jack staggered
back; the driver leaned on the horn; Jack hit his shoulder on an oak tree;
then the incident was over, except for belated adrenalin.

For a full minute afterward, Jack leaned against the oak and felt his
heart pound. As close calls go, this one wasn’t too bad: Jack hadn’t really
been near enough to the road to get hit. Still, Jack needed quite a while to
calm down. How stupid would it be to die in an accident on the day he’d
found something miraculous?

Jack ought to have been watching for trouble. What if the threat had
been a bug-eyed monster instead of a car? Jack should have been alert
and prepared. In his mind’s eye he imagined the incident again, only this
time he casually somersaulted to safety rather than stumbling into a
tree. That’s how you’re supposed to cheat death if you’re carrying a ray-
gun: with cool heroic flair.

But Jack couldn’t do somersaults. He said to himself, Fm Peter Parker,
not Spider-Man.

On the other hand, Jack had just acquired great power. And great re-
sponsibility. Like Peter Parker, Jack had to keep his power secret, for fear

The Ray-Gun: A Love Story

February 2008

of tragic consequences. In Jack’s case, maybe aliens would come for him.
Maybe spies or government agents would kidnap him and his family. No
matter how farfetched those things seemed, the existence of a ray-gun
proved the world wasn’t tame.

That night, Jack debated what to do with the gun. He pictured himself
shooting terrorists and gang lords. If he rid the world of scum, pretty girls
might admire him. But as soon as Jack imagined himself storming into a
terrorist stronghold, he realized he’d get killed almost immediately. The
ray-gun provided awesome firepower, but no defense at all. Besides, if
Jack had found an ordinary gun in the forest, he never would have
dreamed of running around murdering bad guys. Why should a ray-gun
be different?

But it was different. Jack couldn’t put the difference into words, but it
was as real as the weapon’s solid weight in his hands. The ray-gun
changed everything. A world that contained a ray-gun might also contain
flying saucers, beautiful secret agents . . . and heroes.

Heroes who could somersault away from oncoming sports cars. Heroes
who would cope with any danger. Heroes who deserved to have a ray-
gun.

When he was young, Jack had taken for granted he’d become a hero:
brave, skilled, and important. Somehow he’d lost that belief. He’d let him-
self settle for being ordinary. But now he wasn’t ordinary: he had a ray-
gun.

He had to live up to it. Jack had to be ready for bug-eyed monsters and
giant robots. These were no longer childish daydreams; they were real
possibilities in a world where ray-guns existed. Jack could picture him-
self running through town, blasting aliens, and saving the planet.

Such thoughts made sense when Jack held the ray-gun in his hands —
as if the gun planted fantasies in his mind. The feel of the gun filled Jack
with ambition.

All weapons have a sense of purpose.

Jack practiced with the gun as often as he could. To avoid being seen,
he rode his bike to a tract of land in the country: twenty acres owned by
Jack’s great-uncle Ron. No one went there but Jack. Uncle Ron had once
intended to build a house on the property, but that had never happened.
Now Ron was in a nursing home. Jack’s family intended to sell the land
once the old man died, but Ron was healthy for someone in his nineties.
Until Uncle Ron’s health ran out, Jack had the place to himself.

The tract was undeveloped — raw forest, not a woods where children
played. In the middle lay a pond, completely hidden by trees. Jack would
float sticks in the pond and shoot them with the gun.

If he missed, the water boiled. If he didn’t, the sticks were destroyed.
Sometimes they erupted in fire. Sometimes they burst with a bang but no
flame. Sometimes they simply vanished. Jack couldn’t tell if he was doing
something subtly different to get each effect, or if the ray-gun changed
modes on its own. Perhaps it had a computer which analyzed the target
and chose the most lethal attack. Perhaps the attacks were always the
same, but differences in the sticks made for different results. Jack didn’t

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Asimov's

know. But as spring led to summer, he became a better shot. By autumn,
he’d begun throwing sticks into the air and trying to vaporize them before
they reached the ground.

During this time, Jack grew stronger. Long bike rides to the pond
helped his legs and his stamina. In addition, he exercised with fitness
equipment his parents had bought but never used. If monsters ever came,
Jack couldn’t afford to be weak — heroes had to climb fences and break
down doors. They had to balance on rooftops and hang by their fingers
from cliffs. They had to run fast enough to save the girl.

Jack pumped iron and ran every day. As he did so, he imagined dodg-
ing bullets and tentacles. When he felt like giving up, he cradled the ray-
gun in his hands. It gave him the strength to persevere.

Before the ray-gun, Jack had seen himself as just another teenager; his
life didn’t make sense. But the gun made Jack a hero who might be need-
ed to save the Earth. It clarified everything. Sore muscles didn’t matter.
Watching TV was a waste. If you let down your guard, that’s when the
monsters came.

When he wasn’t exercising, Jack studied science. That was another part
of being a hero. He sometimes dreamed he’d analyze the ray-gun, discov-
ering how it worked and giving humans amazing new technology. At oth-
er times, he didn’t want to understand the gun at all. He liked its mys-
tery. Besides, there was no guarantee Jack would ever understand how
the gun worked. Perhaps human science wouldn’t progress far enough in
Jack’s lifetime. Perhaps Jack himself wouldn’t have the brains to figure it
out.

But he had enough brains for high school. He did well; he was motivat-
ed. He had to hold back to avoid attracting attention. When his gym
teacher told him he should go out for track, Jack ran slower and pretend-
ed to get out of breath.

Spider-Man had to do the same.

Two years later, in geography class, a girl named Kirsten gave Jack a
daisy. She said the daisy was good luck and he should make a wish.

Even a sixteen-year-old boy couldn’t misconstrue such a hint. Despite
awkwardness and foot-dragging, Jack soon had a girlfriend.

Kirsten was quiet but pretty. She played guitar. She wrote poems. She’d
never had a boyfriend but she knew how to kiss. These were all good
things. Jack wondered if he should tell her about the ray-gun.

Until Kirsten, Jack’s only knowledge of girls came from his big sister,
Rachel. Rachel was seventeen and incapable of keeping a secret. She
talked with her friends about everything and was too slapdash to hide
private things well. Jack didn’t snoop through his sister’s possessions, but
when Rachel left her bedroom door ajar with empty cigarette packs tum-
bling out of the garbage can, who wouldn’t notice? When she gossiped on
the phone about sex with her boyfriend, who couldn’t overhear? Jack did-
n’t want to listen, but Rachel never lowered her voice. The things Jack
heard made him queasy — about his sister, and girls in general.

If he showed Kirsten the ray-gun, would she tell her friends? Jack
wanted to believe she wasn’t that kind of girl, but he didn’t know how

The Ray-Gun: A Love Story

February 2008

many kinds of girl there were. He just knew that the ray-gun was too im-
portant for him to take chances. Changing the status quo wasn’t worth
the risk.

Yet the status quo changed anyway. The more time Jack spent with
Kirsten, the less he had for shooting practice and other aspects of hero-
dom. He felt guilty for skimping on crisis preparation; but when he went
to the pond or spent a night reading science, he felt guilty for skimping
on Kirsten. Jack would tell her he couldn’t come over to do homework and
when she asked why, he’d have to make up excuses. He felt he was treat-
ing her like an enemy spy: holding her at arm’s length as if she were
some femme fatale who was tempting him to betray state secrets. He hat-
ed not trusting her.

Despite this wall between them, Kirsten became Jack’s lens on the
world. If anything interesting happened, Jack didn’t experience it direct-
ly; some portion of his mind stood back, enjoying the anticipation of hav-
ing something to tell Kirsten about the next time they met. Whatever he
saw, he wanted her to see it too. Whenever Jack heard a joke, even before
he started laughing, he pictured himself repeating it to Kirsten.

Inevitably, Jack asked himself what she’d think of his hero-dom. Would
she be impressed? Would she throw her arms around him and say he was
even more wonderful than she’d thought? Or would she get that look on
her face, the one when she heard bad poetry? Would she think he was an
immature geek who’d read too many comic books and was pursuing some
juvenile fantasy? How could anyone believe hostile aliens might appear
in the sky? And if aliens did show up, how delusional was it that a
teenage boy might make a difference, even if he owned a ray-gun and
could do a hundred push-ups without stopping?

For weeks, Jack agonized: to tell or not to tell. Was Kirsten worthy, or
just a copy of Jack’s sister? Was Jack himself worthy, or just a foolish boy?

One Saturday in May, Jack and Kirsten went biking. Jack led her to the
pond where he practiced with the gun. He hadn’t yet decided what he’d
do when they got there, but Jack couldn’t just tell Kirsten about the ray-
gun. She’d never believe it was real unless she saw the rays in action. But
so much could go wrong. Jack was terrified of giving away his deepest se-
cret. He was afraid that when he saw hero-dom through Kirsten’s eyes,
he’d realize it was silly.

At the pond, Jack felt so nervous he could hardly speak. He babbled
about the warm weather ... a patch of mushrooms ... a crow cawing in a
tree. He talked about everything except what was on his mind.

Kirsten misinterpreted his anxiety. She thought she knew why Jack
had brought her to this secluded spot. After a while, she decided he need-
ed encouragement, so she took off her shirt and her bra.

It was the wrong thing to do. Jack hadn’t meant this outing to be a test
. . . but it was, and Kirsten had failed.

Jack took off his own shirt and wrapped his arms around her, chest
touching breasts for the first time. He discovered it was possible to be ex-
cited and disappointed at the same time.

Jack and Kirsten made out on a patch of hard dirt. It was the first time
they’d been alone with no risk of interruption. They kept their pants on,

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but they knew they could go farther: as far as there was. No one in the
world would stop them from whatever they chose to do. Jack and Kirsten
felt light in their skins — open and dizzy with possibilities.

Yet for Jack, it was all a mistake: one that couldn’t be reversed. Now
he’d never tell Kirsten about the ray-gun. He’d missed his chance because
she’d acted the way Jack’s sister would have acted. Kirsten had been
thinking like a girl and she’d ruined things forever.

Jack hated the way he felt: all angry and resentful. He really liked
Kirsten. He liked making out, and couldn’t wait till the next time. He re-
fused to be a guy who dumped a girl as soon as she let him touch her
breasts. But he was now shut off from her and he had no idea how to get
over that.

In the following months, Jack grew guiltier: he was treating Kirsten as
if she were good enough for sex but not good enough to be told about the
most important thing in his life. As for Kirsten, every day made her more
unhappy: she felt Jack blaming her for something but she didn’t know
what she’d done. When they got together, they went straight to fondling
and more as soon as possible. If they tried to talk, they didn’t know what
to say.

In August, Kirsten left to spend three weeks with her grandparents on
Vancouver Island. Neither she nor Jack missed each other. They didn’t
even miss the sex. It was a relief to be apart. When Kirsten got back, they
went for a walk and a confused conversation. Both produced excuses for
why they couldn’t stay together. The excuses didn’t make sense, but nei-
ther Jack nor Kirsten noticed — they were too ashamed to pay attention
to what they were saying. They both felt like failures. They’d thought
their love would last forever, and now it was ending sordidly.

When the lying was over, Jack went for a run. He ran in a mental blur.
His mind didn’t clear until he found himself at the pond.

Night was drawing in. He thought of all the things he’d done with
Kirsten on the shore and in the water. After that first time, they’d come
here a lot; it was private. Because of Kirsten, this wasn’t the same pond
as when Jack had first begun to practice with the ray-gun. Jack wasn’t
the same boy. He and the pond now carried histories.

Jack could feel himself balanced on the edge of quitting. He’d tinned
seventeen. One more year of high school, then he’d go away to university.
He realized he no longer believed in the imminent arrival of aliens, nor
could he see himself as some great hero saving the world.

Jack knew he wasn’t a hero. He’d used a nice girl for sex, then bed to
get rid of her.

He felt like crap. But blasting the shit out of sticks made him feel a lit-
tle better. The ray-gun still had its uses, even if shooting aliens wasn’t one
of them.

The next day Jack did more blasting. He pumped iron. He got science
books out of the library. Without Kirsten at his side several hours a day,
he had time to fill, and emptiness. By the first day of the new school year,
Jack was back to his full hero-dom program. He no longer deceived him-
self that he was preparing for battle, but the program gave him some-
thing to do: a purpose, a release, and a penance.

The Ray-Gun: A Love Story

February 2008

So that was Jack’s passage into manhood. He was dishonest with the
girl he loved.

Manhood means learning who you are.

In his last year of high school, Jack went out with other girls but he
was past the all-or-nothingness of First Love. He could have casual fun;
he could approach sex with perspective. “Monumental and life-changing”
had been tempered to “pleasant and exciting.” Jack didn’t take his girl-
friends for granted, but they were people, not objects of worship. He was
never tempted to tell any of them about the gun.

When he left town for university. Jack majored in Engineering Physics.
He hadn’t decided whether he’d ever analyze the ray-gun’s inner work-
ings, but he couldn’t imagine taking courses that were irrelevant to the
weapon. The ray-gun was the central fact of Jack’s life. Even if he wasn’t
a hero, he was set apart from other people by this evidence that aliens ex-
isted.

During freshman year, Jack lived in an on-campus dormitory. Hiding
the ray-gun from his roommate would have been impossible. Jack left the
weapon at home, hidden near the pond. In sophomore year, Jack rented
an apartment off campus. Now he could keep the ray-gun with him. He
didn’t like leaving it unattended.

Jack persuaded a lab assistant to let him borrow a Geiger counter. The
ray-gun emitted no radioactivity at all. Objects blasted by the gun
showed no significant radioactivity either. Over time, Jack borrowed oth-
er equipment, or took blast debris to the lab so he could conduct tests
when no one was around. He found nothing that explained how the ray-
gun worked.

The winter before Jack graduated, Great-Uncle Ron finally died. In his
will, the old man left his twenty acres of forest to Jack. Uncle Ron had
found out that Jack liked to visit the pond. “I told him,” said big sister
Rachel. “Do you think I didn’t know where you and Kirsten went?”

Jack had to laugh — uncomfortably. He was embarrassed to discover he
couldn’t keep secrets any better than his sister.

Jack’s father offered to help him sell the land to pay for his education.
The offer was polite, not pressing. Uncle Ron had doled out so much cash
in his will that Jack’s family was now well-off. When Jack said he’d rather
hold on to the property “until the market improves,” no one objected.

After getting his bachelor’s degree, Jack continued on to grad school:
first his master’s, then his Ph.D. In one of his courses, he met Deana,
working toward her own doctorate — in Electrical Engineering rather
than Engineering Physics.

The two programs shared several seminars, but considered themselves
rivals. Engineering Physics students pretended that Electrical Engineers
weren’t smart enough to understand abstract principles. Electrical Engi-
neers pretended that Engineering Physics students were pie-in-the-sky
dreamers whose theories were always wrong until real Engineers fixed
them. Choosing to sit side by side, Jack and Deana teased each other
every class. Within months, Deana moved into Jack’s apartment.

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Deana was small but physical. She told Jack she’d been drawn to him
because he was the only man in their class who lifted weights. When
Deana was young, she’d been a competitive swimmer — “ Very competi-
tive,” she said — but her adolescent growth spurt had never arrived and
she was eventually outmatched by girls with longer limbs. Deana had
quit the competition circuit, but she hadn’t quit swimming, nor had she
lost the drive to be one up on those around her. She saw most things as
contests, including her relationship with Jack. Deana was not beyond
cheating if it gave her an edge.

In the apartment they now shared, Jack thought he’d hidden the ray-
gun so well that Deana wouldn’t find it. He didn’t suspect that when he
wasn’t home, she went through his things. She couldn’t stand the thought
that Jack might have secrets from her.

He returned one day to find the gun on the kitchen table. Deana was
poking at it. Jack wanted to yell, “Leave it alone!” but he was so choked
with anger he couldn’t speak.

Deana’s hand was close to the trigger. The safety was off and the muz-
zle pointed in Jack’s direction. He threw himself to the floor.

Nothing happened. Deana was so surprised by Jack’s sudden move that
she jerked her hand away from the gun. “What the hell are you doing?”

Jack got to his feet. “I could ask you the same question.”

“I found this. I wondered what it was.”

Jack knew she didn’t “find” the gun. It had been buried under old note-
books inside a box at the back of a closet. Jack expected that Deana would
invent some excuse for why she’d been digging into Jack’s private posses-
sions, but the excuse wouldn’t be worth believing.

What infuriated Jack most was that he’d actually been thinking of
showing Deana the gun. She was a very very good engineer; Jack had
dreamed that together, he and she might discover how the gun worked.
Of all the women Jack had known, Deana was the first he’d asked to
move in with him. She was strong and she was smart. She might under-
stand the gun. The time had never been right to tell her the truth — Jack
was still getting to know her and he needed to be absolutely sure — but
Jack had dreamed . . .

And now, like Kirsten at the pond, Deana had ruined everything. Jack
felt so violated he could barely stand to look at the woman. He wanted to
throw her out of the apartment . . . but that would draw too much atten-
tion to the gun. He couldn’t let Deana think the gun was important.

She was still staring at him, waiting for an explanation. “That’s just
something from my Great-Uncle Ron,” Jack said. “An African good-luck
charm. Or Indonesian. I forget. Uncle Ron traveled a lot.” Actually, Ron
sold insurance and seldom left the town where he was bom. Jack picked
up the gun from the table, trying to do so calmly rather than protectively.
“I wish you hadn’t touched this. It’s old and fragile.”

“It felt pretty solid to me.”

“Solid but still breakable.”

“Why did you dive to the floor?”

“Just silly superstition. It’s bad luck to have this end point toward you.”
Jack gestured toward the muzzle. “And it’s good luck to be on this end.”

The Ray-Gun; A Love Story

February 2008

He gestured toward the butt, then tried to make a joke. “Like there’s a
Maxwell demon in the middle, batting bad luck one way and good luck
the other”

“You believe that crap?” Deana asked. She was an engineer. She went
out of her way to disbelieve crap.

“Of course I don’t believe it,” Jack said. “But why ask for trouble?”

He took the gun back to the closet. Deana followed. As Jack returned
the gun to its box, Deana said she’d been going through Jack’s notes in
search of anything he had on partial differential equations. Jack nearly
let her get away with the he; he usually let the women in his life get away
with almost anything. But he realized he didn’t want Deana in his life
anymore. Whatever connection she and he had once felt, it was cut off the
moment he saw her with the ray-gun.

Jack accused her of invading his privacy. Deana said he was paranoid.
The argument grew heated. Out of habit, Jack almost backed down sev-
eral times, but he stopped himself. He didn’t want Deana under the same
roof as the ray-gun. His feelings were partly irrational possessiveness,
but also justifiable caution. If Deana got the gun and accidentally fired it,
the results might be disastrous.

Jack and Deana continued to argue: right there in the closet within
inches of the ray-gun. The gun lay in its box, like a child at the feet of par-
ents fighting over custody. The ray-gun did nothing, as if it didn’t care
who won.

Eventually, unforgivable words were spoken. Deana said she’d move
out as soon as possible. She left to stay the night with a friend.

The moment she was gone, Jack moved the gun. Deana still had a key
to the apartment — she needed it until she could pack her things — and
Jack was certain she’d try to grab the weapon as soon as he was busy
elsewhere. The ray-gun was now a prize in a contest, and Deana never
backed down.

Jack took the weapon to the university. He worked as an assistant for
his Ph.D. supervisor, and he’d been given a locker in the supervisor’s lab.
The locker wasn’t Fort Knox but leaving the gun there was better than
leaving it in the apartment. The more Jack thought about Deana, the more
he saw her as prying and obsessive, grasping for dominance. He didn’t
know what he’d ever seen in her.

The next morning, he wondered if he had overreacted. Was he demo-
nizing his ex like a sitcom cliche? If she was so egotistic, why hadn’t he
noticed before? Jack had no good answer. He decided he didn’t need one.
Unlike when he broke up with Kirsten, Jack felt no guilt this time. The
sooner Deana was gone, the happier he’d be.

In a few days, Deana called to say she’d found a new place to five. She
and Jack arranged a time for her to pick up her belongings. Jack didn’t
want to be there while she moved out; he couldn’t stand seeing her in the
apartment again. Instead, Jack went back to his home town for a long
weekend with his family.

It was lucky he did. Jack left Friday afternoon and didn’t get back to
the university until Monday night. The police were waiting for him.
Deana had disappeared late Saturday.

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Asimov's

She’d talked to friends on Saturday afternoon. She’d made arrange-
ments for Sunday brunch but hadn’t shown up. No one had seen her
since.

As the ex-boyfriend, Jack was a prime suspect. But his alibi was solid:
his hometown was hundreds of miles from the university, and his family
could testify he’d been there the whole time. Jack couldn’t possibly have
sneaked back to the university, made Deana disappear, and raced back
home.

Grudgingly, the police let Jack off the hook. They decided Deana must
have been depressed by the break-up of the relationship. She might have
run off so she wouldn’t have to see Jack around the university. She might
even have committed suicide.

Jack suspected otherwise. As soon as the police let him go, he went to
his supervisor’s lab. His locker had been pried open. The ray-gun lay on a
nearby lab bench.

Jack could easily envision what happened. While moving out her
things, Deana searched for the ray-gun. She hadn’t found it in the apart-
ment. She knew Jack had a locker in the lab and she’d guessed he’d
stashed the weapon there. She broke open the locker to get the gun. She’d
examined it and perhaps tried to take it apart. The gun went off.

Now Deana was gone. Not even a smudge on the floor. The ray-gun lay
on the lab bench as guiltless as a stone. Jack was the only one with a con-
science.

He suffered for weeks. Jack wondered how he could feel so bad about a
woman who’d made him furious. But he knew the source of his guilt:
while he and Deana were arguing in the closet, Jack had imagined va-
porizing her with the gun. He was far too decent to shoot her for real, but
the thought had crossed his mind. If Deana simply vanished, Jack would-
n’t have to worry about what she might do. The ray-gun had made that
thought come true, as if it had read Jack’s mind.

Jack told himself the notion was ridiculous. The gun wasn’t some genie
who granted Jack’s unspoken wishes. What happened to Deana came
purely from her own bad luck and inquisitiveness.

Still, Jack felt like a murderer. After all this time, Jack realized the ray-
gun was too dangerous to keep. As long as Jack had it, he’d be forced to
live alone: never marrying, never having children, never trusting the gun
around other people. And even if Jack became a recluse, accidents could
happen. Someone else might die. It would be Jack’s fault.

He wondered why he’d never had this thought before. Jack suddenly
saw himself as one of those people who own a vicious attack dog. People
like that always claimed they could keep the dog under control. How of-
ten did they end up on the evening news? How often did children get bit-
ten, maimed, or killed?

Some dogs are tragedies waiting to happen. The ray-gun was too. It
would keep slipping off its leash until it was destroyed. Twelve years af-
ter finding the gun, Jack realized he finally had a heroic mission: to get
rid of the weapon that made him a hero in the first place.

Tm not Spider-Man, he thought, Ym Frodo.

But how could Jack destroy something that had survived so much? The

The Ray-Gun: A Love Story

February 2008

gun hadn’t frozen in the cold of outer space; it hadn’t burned up as it
plunged through Earth’s atmosphere; it hadn’t broken when it hit the
ground at terminal velocity. If the gun could endure such punishment, ex-
treme measures would be needed to lay it to rest.

Jack imagined putting the gun into a blast furnace. But what if the
weapon went off? What if it shot out the side of the furnace? The furnace
itself could explode. That would be a disaster. Other means of destruction
had similar problems. Crushing the gun in a hydraulic press . . . what if
the gun shot a hole in the press, sending pieces of equipment flying in all
directions? Immersing the gun in acid . . . what if the gun went off and
splashed acid over everything? Slicing into the gun with a laser . . . Jack
didn’t know what powered the gun, but obviously it contained vast ener-
gy. Destabilizing that energy might cause an explosion, a radiation leak,
or some even greater catastrophe. Who knew what might happen if you
tampered with alien technology?

And what if the gun could protect itself? Over the years, Jack had read
every ray-gun story he could find. In some stories, such weapons had
built-in computers. They had enough artificial intelligence to assess their
situations. If they didn’t like what was happening, they took action. What
if Jack’s gun was similar? What if attempts to destroy the weapon in-
duced it to fight back? What if the ray-gun got mad?

Jack decided the only safe plan was to drop the gun into an ocean — the
deeper the better. Even then, Jack feared the gun would somehow make
its way back to shore. He hoped that the weapon would take years or
even centuries to return, by which time humanity might be scientifically
equipped to deal with the ray-gun’s power.

Jack’s plan had one weakness: both the university and Jack’s home
town were far from the sea. Jack didn’t know anyone with an ocean-going
boat suitable for dumping objects into deep water. He’d just have to drive
to the coast and see if he could rent something.

But not until summer. Jack was in the final stages of his Ph.D. and didn’t
have time to leave the university for an extended trip. As a temporary
measure, Jack moved the ray-gun back to the pond. He buried the
weapon several feet underground, hoping that would keep it safe from
animals and anyone else who happened by.

(Jack imagined a new generation of lovesick teenagers discovering the
pond. If that happened, he wanted them safe. Like a real hero, Jack cared
about people he didn’t know.)

Jack no longer practiced with the gun, but he maintained his physical
regimen. He tried to exhaust himself so he wouldn’t have the energy to
brood. It didn’t work. Lying sleepless in bed, he kept wondering what
would have happened if he’d told Deana the truth. She wouldn’t have
killed herself if she’d been warned to be cautious. But Jack had cared
more about his precious secret than Deana’s life.

In the dark, Jack muttered, “It was her own damned fault.” His words
were true, but not true enough.

When Jack wasn’t at the gym, he cloistered himself with schoolwork
and research. (His doctoral thesis was about common properties of differ-

James Alan Gardner

Asimov's

ent types of high-energy beams.) Jack didn’t socialize. He seldom phoned
home. He took days to answer email messages from his sister. Even so, he
told himself he was doing an excellent job of acting “normal.”

Jack had underestimated his sister’s perceptiveness. One weekend,
Rachel showed up on his doorstep to see why he’d “gone weird.” She spent
two days digging under his skin. By the end of the weekend, she could tell
that Deana’s disappearance had disturbed Jack profoundly. Rachel couldn’t
guess the full truth, but as a big sister, she felt entitled to meddle in
Jack’s life. She resolved to snap her brother out of his low spirits.

The next weekend Rachel showed up on Jack’s doorstep again. This
time, she brought Kirsten.

Nine years had passed since Kirsten and Jack had seen each other: the
day they both graduated from high school. In the intervening time, when
Jack had thought of Kirsten, he always pictured her as a high-school girl.
It was strange to see her as a woman. At twenty-seven, she was not great-
ly changed from eighteen— new glasses and a better haircut — but despite
similarities to her teenage self, Kirsten wore her life differently. She’d
grown up.

So had Jack. Meeting Kirsten by surprise made Jack feel ambushed,
but he soon got over it. Rachel helped by talking loud and fast through
the initial awkwardness. She took Jack and Kirsten for coffee, and acted
as emcee as they got reacquainted.

Kirsten had followed a path close to Jack’s: university and graduate
work. She told him, “No one makes a living as a poet. Most of us find jobs
as English professors — teaching poetry to others who won’t make a living
at it either.”

Kirsten had earned her doctorate a month earlier. Now she was living
back home. She currently had no man in her life — her last relationship
had fizzled out months ago, and she’d decided to avoid new involvements
until she knew where she would end up teaching. She’d sent her resume
to English departments all over the continent and was optimistic about
her chances of success; to Jack’s surprise, Kirsten had published dozens
of poems in literary magazines. She’d even sold two to The New Yorker.
Her publishing record would be enough to interest many English depart-
ments.

After coffee, Rachel dragged Jack to a mall where she and Kirsten
made him buy new clothes. Rachel bullied Jack while Kirsten made
apologetic suggestions. Jack did his best to be a good sport; as they left
the mall, Jack was surprised to find that he’d actually had a good time.

That evening, there was wine and more conversation. Rachel took
Jack’s bed, leaving him and Kirsten to make whatever arrangements
they chose. The two of them joked about Rachel trying to pair them up
again. Eventually Kirsten took the couch in the living room while Jack
crawled into a sleeping bag on the kitchen floor . . . but that was only after
talking till three in the morning.

Rachel and Kirsten left the next afternoon, but Jack felt cleansed by
their visit. He stayed in touch with Kirsten by email. It was casual: not
romance, but a knowing friendship.

In the next few months, Kirsten got job interviews with several colleges

The Ray-Gun: A Love Story

February 2008

and universities. She accepted a position on the Oregon coast. She sent
Jack pictures of the school. It was directly on the ocean; it even had a
beach. Kirsten said she’d always liked the water. She teasingly reminded
him of their times at the pond.

But when Jack saw Kirsten’s pictures of the Pacific, all he could think
of was dumping the ray-gun into the sea. He could drive out to visit her . . .
rent a boat . . . sail out to deep water . . .

No. Jack knew nothing about sailing, and he didn’t have enough money
to rent a boat that could venture far offshore. “How many years have I
been preparing?” he asked himself. “Didn’t I intend to be ready for any
emergency? Now I have an honest-to-god mission, and I’m useless.”

Then Kirsten sent him an emailed invitation to go sailing with her.

She had access to a sea-going yacht. It belonged to her grandparents —
the ones she’d visited on Vancouver Island just before she and Jack broke
up. During her trip to the island, Kirsten had gone boating with her
grandparents every day. At the start, she’d done it to take her mind off
Jack; then she’d discovered she enjoyed being out on the waves.

She’d spent time with her grandparents every summer since, learning
the ins and outs of yachting. She’d taken courses. She’d earned the neces-
sary licenses. Now Kirsten was fully qualified for deep-water excursions . . .
and as a gift to wish her well on her new job, Kirsten’s grandparents were
lending her their boat for a month. They intended to sail down to Oregon,
spend a few days there, then fly off to tour Australia. When they were
done, they’d return and sail back home; but in the meantime, Kirsten
would have the use of their yacht. She asked Jack if he’d like to be her
crew.

When Jack got this invitation, he couldn’t help being disturbed. Kirsten
had never mentioned boating before. Because she was living in their
hometown, most of her email to Jack had been about old high-school
friends. Jack had even started to picture her as a teenager again; he’d
spent a weekend with the grown-up Kirsten, but all her talk of high-
school people and places had muddled Jack’s mental image of her. The
thought of a bookish teenage girl captaining a yacht was absurd.

But that was a lesser problem compared to the suspicious convenience
of her invitation. Jack needed a boat; all of a sudden, Kirsten had one. The
coincidence was almost impossible to swallow.

He thought of the unknown aliens who made the ray-gun. Could they
be influencing events? If the ray-gun was intelligent, could it be responsi-
ble for the coincidence?

Kirsten had often spent time near the gun. On their first visit to the
pond, she and Jack had lain half-naked with the gun in Jack’s backpack
beside them.

He thought of Kirsten that day. So open. So vulnerable. The gun had
been within inches. Had it nurtured Kirsten’s interest in yachting . . . her
decision to get a job in Oregon . . . even her grandparents’ offer of their
boat? Had it molded Kirsten’s life so she was ready when Jack needed
her? And if the gun could do that, what had it done to Jack himself?

This is ridiculous. Jack thought. The gun is just a gun. It doesn’t
control people. It just kills them.

James Alan Gardner

Asimov's

Yet Jack couldn’t shake off his sense of eeriness — about Kirsten as well
as the ray-gun. All these years, while Jack had been preparing himself to
be a hero, Kirsten had somehow done the same. Her self-improvement
program had worked better than Jack’s. She had a boat; he didn’t.

Coincidence or not, Jack couldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. He told
Kirsten he’d be delighted to go sailing with her. Only later did he realize
that their time on the yacht would have a sexual subtext. He broke out
laughing. “I’m such an idiot. We’ve done it again.” Like that day at the
pond, Jack had only been thinking about the gun. Kirsten had been
thinking about Jack. Her invitation wasn’t a carte-blanche come-on but
it had a strong hint of, “Let’s get together and see what develops.”

Where Kirsten was concerned, Jack had always been slow to catch the
signals. He thought, Obviously, the ray-gun keeps dulling my senses.
This time, Jack meant it as a joke.

Summer came. Jack drove west with the ray-gun in the trunk of his car.
The gun’s safety was on, but Jack still drove as if he were carrying nu-
clear waste. He’d taken the gun back and forth between his hometown
and university many times, but this trip was longer, on unfamiliar roads.
It was also the last trip Jack ever intended to make with the gun; if the
gun didn’t want to be thrown into the sea, perhaps it would cause trou-
ble. But it didn’t.

For much of the drive, Jack debated how to tell Kirsten about the gun.
He’d considered smuggling it onto the boat and throwing the weapon
overboard when she wasn’t looking, but Jack felt that he owed her the
truth. It was overdue. Besides, this cruise could be the beginning of a new
relationship. Jack didn’t want to start by sneaking behind Kirsten’s back.

So he had to reveal his deepest secret. Every other secret would follow:
what happened to Deana; what had really been on Jack’s mind that day
at the pond; what made First Love go sour. Jack would expose his guilt to
the woman who’d suffered from the fallout.

He thought, She’ll probably throw me overboard with the gun. But
he would open up anyway, even if it made Kirsten hate him. When he
tossed the ray-gun into the sea, he wanted to unburden himself of every-
thing.

The first day on the boat, Jack said nothing about the ray-gun. Instead,
he talked compulsively about trivia. So did Kirsten. It was strange being
together, looking so much the way they did in high school but being en-
tirely different people.

Fortunately, they had practical matters to fill their time. Jack needed a
crash course in seamanship. He learned quickly. Kirsten was a good
teacher. Besides, Jack’s longstanding program of hero-dom had prepared
his mind and muscles. Kirsten was impressed that he knew Morse code
and had extensive knowledge of knots. She asked, “Were you a Boy
Scout?”

“No. WHien I was a kid, I wanted to be able to untie myself if I ever got
captured by spies.”

Kirsten laughed. She thought he was joking.

The Ray-Gun: A Love Story

February 2008

That first day, they stayed close to shore. They never had to deal with
being alone; there were always other yachts in sight, and sailboats, and
people on shore. When night came, they put in to harbor. They ate in an
ocean-view restaurant. Jack asked, “So where will we go tomorrow?”

“Where would you like? Up the coast, down the coast, or straight out to
sea?”

“Why not straight out?” said Jack.

Back on the yacht, he and Kirsten talked long past midnight. There
was only one cabin, but two separate fold-away beds. Without discussion,
they each chose a bed. Both usually slept in the nude, but for this trip
they’d both brought makeshift “pajamas” consisting of a T-shirt and track
pants. They laughed at the clothes, the coincidence, and themselves.

They didn’t kiss good night. Jack silently wished they had. He hoped
Kirsten was wishing the same thing. They talked for an hour after they’d
turned out the fights, becoming nothing but voices in the dark.

The next day they sailed due west. Both waited to see if the other
would suggest turning back before dark. Neither did. The farther they got
from shore, the fewer other boats remained in sight. By sunset, Jack and
Kirsten knew they were once more alone with each other. No one in the
world would stop them from whatever they chose to do.

Jack asked Kirsten to stay on deck. He went below and got the ray-gun
from his luggage. He brought it up into the twilight. Before he could
speak, Kirsten said, “I’ve seen that before.”

Jack stared at her in shock. “What? Where?”

“I saw it years ago, in the woods back home. I was out for a walk. I no-
ticed it lying in a little crater, as if it had fallen from the sky.”

“Really? You found it too?”

“But I didn’t touch it,” Kirsten said. “I don’t know why. Then I heard
someone coming and I ran away. But the memory stayed vivid in my
head. A mysterious object in a crater in the woods. I can’t tell you how of-
ten I’ve tried to write poems about it, but they never work out.” She
looked at the gun in Jack’s hands. “What is it?”

“A ray-gun,” he said. In the fading fight, he could see a clump of sea-
weed floating a short distance from the boat. He raised the gun and fired.
The seaweed exploded in a blaze of fire, burning brightly against the dark
waves.

“A ray-gun,” said Kirsten. “Can I try it?”

Some time later, holding hands, they let the gun fall into the water. It
sank without protest.

Long after that, they talked in each other’s arms. Jack said the gun had
made him who he was. Kirsten said she was the same. “Until I saw the
gun, I just wrote poems about myself — overwritten self-absorbed pap, like
every teenage girl. But the gun gave me something else to write about. I’d
only seen it for a minute, but it was one of those bumed-into-your-memo-
ry moments. I felt driven to find words to express what I’d seen. I kept re-
fining my poems, trying to make them better. That’s what made the dif-
ference.”

James Alan Gardner

Asimov's

“I felt driven too,” Jack said. “Sometimes I’ve wondered if the gun can
affect human minds. Maybe it brainwashed us into becoming who we
are.

“Or maybe it’s just Stone Soup,” Kirsten said. “You know the story?
Someone claims he can make soup from a stone, but what he really does
is trick people into adding their own food to the pot. Maybe the ray-gun
is like that. It did nothing but sit there like a stone. You and I did every-
thing — made ourselves who we are — and the ray-gun is only an excuse.”

“Maybe,” Jack said. “But so many coincidences brought us here ”

“You think the gun manipulated us because it wanted to be thrown
into the Pacific? Why?”

“Maybe even a ray-gun gets tired of killing.” Jack shivered, thinking of
Deana. “Maybe the gun feels guilty for the deaths it’s caused; it wanted to
go someplace where it would never have to kill again.”

“Deana’s death wasn’t your fault,” Kirsten said. “Really, Jack. It was
awful, but it wasn’t your fault.” She shivered too, then made her voice
brighter. “Maybe the ray-gun orchestrated all this because it’s an incur-
able romantic. It wanted to bring us together: our own personal match-
maker from the stars.”

Jack kissed Kirsten on the nose. “If that’s true, I don’t object.”

“Neither do I.” She kissed him back.

Not on the nose.

Far below, the ray-gun drifted through the cold black depths. Beneath
it, on the bottom of the sea, lay wreckage from the starship that had ex-
ploded centuries before. The wreckage had traveled all the way from
Jupiter. Because of tiny differences in trajectory, the wreckage had
splashed down thousands of miles from where the ray-gun landed.

The ray-gun sank straight toward the wreckage . . . but what the
wreckage held or why the ray-gun wanted to rejoin it, we will never know.

We will never comprehend aliens. If someone spent a month explaining
alien thoughts to us, we’d think we understood.

But we wouldn’t. O

THE MIRROR SPEAKS

Nothing but egomaniacs
always bothering me.

Ask someone else. I'd like to say.

For heaven's sake, ask your husband.
Ask a glossy magazine.

Every now and then
I give a surprise answer,
shake things up a bit.

What harm could it do?

—Jessy Randall

The Ray-Gun: A Love Story

Mary Rosenblum's first professional publication, "For a
Price" ( Asimov's , June 1990), was a story she'd written
for the 1988 Clarion West Writers' Workshop. Mary will
complete a professional circle when she takes on the
role of instructor at this year's workshop. Since her first
publication, she has written eight novels and sold more
than sixty short stories to SF, mystery, and mainstream
markets. The paperback edition of her newest novel.
Horizons , was released by Tor Books in November 2007.
Water Rites , a compendium of the novel Drylands and
three prequel novelettes that first appeared in Asimov's ,
came out from Fairwood Press in January 2007. Although
the action in her latest story takes place hundreds of
miles south of her earlier works, the people are equally
brave, and the land as hard and unforgiving in . . .

THE
MAN

Mary Rosenblum

Tm ipakna halted at midday to let the Dragon power up the batteries. He
checked on the chickens clucking contentedly in their travel crates, then
went outside to squat in the shade of one fully deployed solar wing in the
43 centigrade heat. Ilena, his sometimes-lover and poker partner, accused
him of reverse snobbery, priding himself on being able to survive in the
Sonoran heat without air conditioning. Zipakna smiled and tilted his wa-
ter bottle, savoring the cool, sweet trickle of water across his tongue.

Not true, of course. He held still as the first wild bees found him,
buzzed past his face to settle and sip from the sweat-drops beading on his
skin. Killers. He held very still, but the caution wasn’t really necessary.
Thirst was the great gentler here. Every other drive was laid aside in the
pursuit of water.

Even love?

Asimov's

He laughed a short note as the killers buzzed and sipped. So Ilena
claimed, but she just missed him when she played the tourists without
him. It had been mostly tourists from China lately, filling the underwater
resorts in the Sea of Cortez. Chinese were rich and tough players and Ile-
na had been angry at him for leaving. But he always left in spring. She
knew that. In front of him, the scarp he had been traversing ended in a
bluff, eroded by water that had fallen here eons ago. The plain below
spread out in tones of ochre and russet, dotted with dusty clumps of sage
and the stark upward thrust of saguaro, lonely sentinels contemplating
the desiccated plain of the Sonoran and in the distance, the ruins of a
town. Paloma? Zipakna tilted his wrist, called up his position on his link.
Yes, that was it. He had wandered a bit farther eastward than he’d
thought and had cut through the edge of the Pima preserve. Sure enough,
a fine had been levied against his account. He sighed. He serviced the
Pima settlement out here and they didn’t mind if he trespassed. It mere-
ly became a bargaining chip when it came time to talk price. The Pima
loved to bargain.

He really should let the nav-link plot his course, but Ilena was right
about that, at least. He prided himself on finding his way through the
Sonora without it. Zipakna squinted as a flicker of movement caught his
eye. A lizard? Maybe. Or one of the tough desert rodents. They didn’t need
to drink, got their water from seeds and cactus fruit. More adaptable than
Homo sapiens, he thought, and smiled grimly.

He pulled his binocs from his belt pouch and focused on the movement.
The digital lenses seemed to suck him through the air like a thrown
spear, gray-ochre blur resolving into stone, mica flash, and yes, the brown
and gray shape of a lizard. The creature’s head swiveled, throat pulsing,
so that it seemed to stare straight into his eyes. Then, in an eyeblink, it
vanished. The Dragon chimed its full battery load. Time to go. He stood
carefully, a cloud of thirsty killer bees and native wasps buzzing about
him, shook free of them and slipped into the coolness of the Dragon’s in-
terior. The hens clucked in the rear and the Dragon furled its solar wings
and lurched forward, crawling down over the edge of the scarp, down to
the plain below and its saguaro sentinels.

His sat-link chimed and his console screen brightened to fife. You are
entering unserviced United States territory The voice was female and se-
vere. No support services will be provided from this point on. Your entry
visa does not assure assistance in unserviced regions. Please file all com-
plaints with the US Bureau of Land Management. Please consult with
your insurance provider before continuing. Did he detect a note of disap-
proval in the sat-link voice? Zipakna grinned without humor and guided
the Dragon down the steep slope, its belted treads barely marring the dry
surface as he navigated around rock and thorny clumps of mesquite. He
was a citizen of the Republic of Mexico and the US’s sat eyes would cer-
tainly track his chip. They just wouldn’t send a rescue if he got into trouble.

Such is life, he thought, and swatted an annoyed killer as it struggled
against the windshield.

He passed the first of Paloma’s plantings an hour later. The glassy

The Egg Man 51

February 2008

black disks of the solar collectors glinted in the sun, powering the drip
system that fed the scattered clumps of greenery. Short, thick-stalked
sunflowers turned their dark faces to the sun, fringed with orange and
scarlet petals. Zipakna frowned thoughtfully and videoed one of the wide
blooms as the Dragon crawled past. Sure enough, his screen lit up with a
similar blossom crossed with a circle-slash of warning.

An illegal pharm crop. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled. This
was new. He almost turned around, but he liked the folk in Paloma. Good
people; misfits, not sociopaths. It was an old settlement and one of his fa-
vorites. He sighed, because three diabetics lived here and a new bird flu
had come over from Asia. It would find its way here eventually, riding the
migration routes. He said a prayer to the old gods and his mother’s Santa
Maria for good measure and crawled on into town.

Nobody was out this time of day. Heat waves shimmered above the
black solar panels and a lizard whip-flicked beneath the sagging Country
Market’s porch. He parked the Dragon in the dusty lot at the end of Main
Street where a couple of buildings had burned long ago and unfurled the
solar wings again. It took a lot of power to keep them from baking here.
In the back Ezzie was clucking imperatively. The oldest of the chickens,
she always seemed to know when they were stopping at a settlement.
That meant fresh greens. “You’re a pig,” he said, but he chuckled as he
made his way to the back to check on his flock.

The twenty hens clucked and scratched in their individual cubicles, ex-
cited at the halt. “I’ll let you out soon,” he promised and measured laying
ration into their feeders. Bella had already laid an egg. He reached into
her cubicle and cupped it in his hand, pale pink and smooth, still warm
and faintly moist from its passage out of her body. Insulin nano-bodies,
designed to block the auto-immune response that destroyed the insulin
producing Beta cells in diabetics. He labeled Bella’s egg and put it into
the egg fridge. She was his highest producer. He scooped extra ration into
her feeder.

Intruder, his alarm system announced. The heads-up display above the
front console fit up. Zipakna glanced at it, brows furrowed, then smiled.
He slipped to the door, touched it open. “You could just knock,” he said.

The skinny boy hanging from the front of the Dragon by his fingers as
he tried to peer through the windscreen let go, missed his footing and
landed on his butt in the dust.

“It’s too hot out here,” Zipakna said. “Come inside. You can see better.”

The boy looked up, his face tawny with Sonoran dust, hazel eyes wide
with fear.

Zipakna’s heart froze and time seemed to stand still. She must have
looked like this as a kid, he thought. Probably just like this, considering
how skinny and androgynous she had been in her twenties. He shook
himself. “It’s all right,” he said and his voice only quivered a little. “You
can come in.”

“Ella said you have chickens. She said they lay magic eggs. I’ve never
seen a chicken. But Pierre says there’s no magic.” The fear had vanished
from his eyes, replaced now by bright curiosity.

That, too, was like her. Fear had never had a real hold on her.

Mary Rosenblum

Asimov's

How many times had he wished it had?

“I do have chickens. You can see them now.” He held the door open.
“What’s your name?”

“Daren.” The boy darted past him, quick as one of the desert’s lizards,
scrambled into the Dragon.

Her father’s name.

Zipakna climbed in after him, feeling old suddenly, dry as this ancient
desert. I can’t have kids, she had said, so earnest. How could I take a child
into the uncontrolled areas ? How could I leave one behind 1 ? Maybe later.
After I’m done out there.

“It’s freezing in here.” Daren stared around at the control bank under
the wide windscreen, his bare arms and legs, skin clay-brown from the
sun, ridged with goosebumps.

So much bare skin scared Zipakna. Average age for onset of melanoma
without regular boosters was twenty-five. “Want something to drink? You
can go look at the chickens. They’re in the back.”

“Water?” The boy gave him a bright, hopeful look. “Ella has a chicken.
She lets me take care of it.” He disappeared into the chicken space.

Zipakna opened the egg fridge. Bianca laid steadily even though she
didn’t have the peak capacity that some of the others did. So he had a good
stock of her eggs. The boy was murmuring to the hens who were clucking
greetings at him. “You can take one out,” Zipakna called back to him.
“They like to be held.” He opened a packet of freeze-dried chocolate soy
milk, reconstituted it, and whipped one of Bianca’s eggs into it, so that it
frothed tawny and rich. The gods knew if the boy had ever received any
immunizations at all. Bianca provided the basic panel of nanobodies
against most of the common pathogens and cancers. Including melanoma.

In the chicken room, Daren had taken Bella out of her cage, held her
cradled in his arms. The speckled black and white hen clucked content-
edly, occasionally pecking Daren’s chin lightly. “She likes to be petted,” Zi-
pakna said. “If you rub her comb she’ll sing to you. I made you a milk-
shake.”

The boy’s smile blossomed as Bella gave out with the almost-melodic
squawks and creaks that signified her pleasure. “What’s a milkshake?”
Still smiling, he returned the hen to her cage and eyed the glass.

“Soymilk and chocolate and sugar.” He handed it to Daren, found him-
self holding his breath as the boy tasted it and considered.

“Pretty sweet.” He drank some. “I like it anyway.”

To Zipakna’s relief he drank it all and licked foam from his lip.

“So when did you move here?” Zipakna took the empty glass, rinsed it
at the sink.

“Wow, you use water to clean dishes?” The boy’s eyes had widened. “We
came here last planting time. Pierre brought those seeds.” He pointed in
the general direction of the sunflower fields.

Zipakna’s heart sank. “You and your parents?” He made his voice light.

Daren didn’t answer for a moment. “Pierre. My father.” He looked back
to the chicken room. “If they’re not magic, why do you give them water?
Ella’s chicken warns her about snakes, but you don’t have to worry about
snakes in here. What good are they?”

The Egg Man

February 2008

The cold logic of the Dry, out here beyond the security net of civilized
space. “Their eggs keep you healthy” He watched the boy consider that.
“You know Ella, right?” He waited for the boy’s nod. “She has a disease
that would kill her if she didn’t eat an egg from that chicken you were
holding every year.”

Daren frowned, clearly doubting that. “You mean like a snake egg?
They’re good, but Ella’s chicken doesn’t lay eggs. And snake eggs don’t
make you get better when you’re sick ”

“They don’t. And Ella’s chicken is a banty rooster. He doesn’t lay eggs.”
Zipakna looked up as a figure moved on the heads-up. “Bella is special
and so are her eggs ” He opened the door. “Hello, Ella, what are you doing
out here in the heat?”

“I figured he’d be out here bothering you.” Ella hoisted herself up the
Dragon’s steps, her weathered, sun-dried face the color of real leather, her
loose sun-shirt falling back from the stringy muscles of her arms as she
reached up to kiss Zipakna on the cheek. “You behavin’ yourself boy? I’ll
switch you if you aren’t.”

“I’m being good.” Daren grinned. “Ask him.”

“He is.” Zipakna eyed her face and briefly exposed arms, looking for any
sign of melanoma. Even with the eggs, you could still get it out here with
no UV protection. “So, Ella, you got some new additions to town, eh? New
crops, too, I see.” He watched her look away, saw her face tighten.

“Now don’t you start.” She stared at the south viewscreen filled with
the bright heads of sunflowers. “Prices on everything we have to buy keep
going up. And the Pima are tight, you know that. Plain sunflower oil don’t
bring much.”

“So now you got something that can get you raided. By the government
or someone worse.”

“You’re the one comes out here from the city where you got water and
power, go hiking around in the dust with enough stuff to keep raiders fat
and happy for a year.” Ella’s leathery face creased into a smile. “You
preachin’ risk at me, Zip?”

“Ah, but we know Fm crazy, eh?” He returned her smile, but shook his
head. “I hope you’re still here, next trip. How’re your sugar levels? You
been checking?”

“If we ain’t we ain’t.” She lifted one bony shoulder in a shrug. “They’re
holding. They always do.”

“The eggs do make you well?” Daren looked at Ella.

“Yeah, they do.” Ella cocked her head at him. “There’s magic, even if
Pierre don’t believe it ”

“Do you really come from a city?” Daren was looking up at Zipakna
now. “With a dome and water in the taps and everything?”

“Well, I come from Oaxaca, which doesn’t have a dome. I spend most of
my time in La Paz. It’s on the Baja peninsula, if you know where that is.”

“I do.” He grinned. “Ella’s been schooling me. I know where Oaxaca is,
too. You’re Mexican, right?” He tilted his head. “How come you come up
here with your eggs?”

Ella was watching him, her dark eyes sharp with surmise. Nobody had
ever asked him that question openly before. It wasn’t the kind of question

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you asked, out here. Not out loud. He looked down into Daren’s hazel
eyes, into her eyes. “Because nobody else does.”

Daren’s eyes darkened and he looked down at the floor, frowning slightly.

“Sit down, Ella, let me get you your egg. Long as you’re here.” Zipakna
turned quickly to the kitchen wall and filled glasses with water. While
they drank, he got Bella’s fresh egg from the egg fridge and cracked it
into a glass, blending it with the raspberry concentrate that Ella favored
and a bit of soy milk.

“That’s a milkshake,” Daren announced as Zipakna handed Ella the
glass. “He made me one, too.” He looked up at Zipakna. “I’m not sick.”

“He didn’t think you were.” Ella lifted her glass in a salute. “Because
nobody else does.” Drank it down. “You gonna come eat with us tonight?”
Usually the invitation came with a grin that revealed the gap in her up-
per front teeth, and a threat about her latest pequin salsa. Today her
smile was cautious. Wary. “Daren?” She nodded at the boy. “You go help
Maria with the food. You know it’s your turn today.”

“Aw.” He scuffed his bare feet, but headed for the door. “Can I come pet
the chickens again?” He looked back hopefully from the door, grinned at
Zipakna’s nod, and slipped out, letting in a breath of oven-air.

“Ah, Ella.” Zipakna sighed and reached into the upper cupboard. “Why
did you plant those damn sunflowers?” He pulled out the bottle of aged
mescal tucked away behind the freeze-dried staples. He filled a small,
thick glass and set it down on the table in front of Ella beside her refilled
water glass. “This can be the end of the settlement. You know that.”

“The end can come in many ways.” She picked up the glass, held it up to
the light. “Perhaps fast is better than slow, eh?” She sipped the liquor,
closed her eyes and sighed. “Luna and her husband tried for amnesty, ap-
plied to get a citizen-visa at the border. They’ve canceled the amnesty. You
live outside the serviced areas, I guess you get to stay out here. I guess
the US economy faltered again. No more new citizens from Outside. And
you know Mexico’s policy about US immigration.” She shrugged. “I’m sur-
prised they even let you come up here.”

“Oh, my government doesn’t mind traffic in this direction. It likes to
rub the US’s nose in the fact that we send aid to its own citizens,” he said
lightly. Yeah, the border was closed tight to immigration from the north
right now, because the US was being sticky about tariffs. “I can’t believe
they’ve made the Interior Boundaries airtight.” That was what she had
been afraid of, all those years ago.

“I guess they have to keep cutting and cutting.” Ella drained the glass,
probing for the last drops of amber liquor with her tongue. “No, one is
enough.” She shook her head as he turned to the cupboard. “The folks
that live nice want to keep it that way, so you got to cut somewhere. We
all know the US is slowly eroding away. It’s not a superpower anymore.
They just pretend.” She looked up at Zipakna, her eyes like flakes of ob-
sidian set into the nested wrinkles of her sun-dried face. “What is your in-
terest in the boy, Zip? He’s too young.”

He turned away from those obsidian-flake eyes. “You misunderstand.”

She waited, didn’t say anything.

“Once upon a time there was a woman.” He stared at the sun-baked

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February 2008

emptiness of the main street on the vid screen. A tumbleweed skeleton
turned slowly, fitfully across dust and cracked asphalt. “She had a
promising career in academics, but she preferred field work.”

“Field work?”

“She was a botanist. She created some drought-tolerant GMOs and
started field testing them. They were designed for the drip irrigation ag
areas, but she decided to test them . . . out here. She . . . got caught up in
it . . . establishing adaptive GMOs out here to create sustainable har-
vests. She . . . gave up an academic career. Put everything into this pro-
ject. Got some funding for it.”

Ella sat without speaking as the silence stretched between them.
“What happened to her?” She asked it, finally.

“I don’t know.” The tumbleweed had run up against the pole of a rusted
and dented No Parking sign and quivered in the hot wind. “I . . . lost con-
tact with her.”

Ella nodded, her face creased into thoughtful folds. “I see.”

No, you don’t, he thought.

“How long ago?”

“Fifteen years.”

“So he’s not your son.”

He flinched even though he’d known the question was coming. “No.” He
was surprised at how hard it was to speak that word.

Ella levered herself to her feet, leaning hard on the table. Pain in her
hip. The osteo-sarcoma antibodies his chickens produced weren’t specific
to her problem. A personally tailored anti-cancer panel might cure her,
but that cost money. A lot of money. He wasn’t a doctor, but he’d seen
enough osteo out here to measure her progress. It was the water, he
guessed. “I brought you a present.” He reached up into the cupboard
again, brought out a flat plastic bottle of mescal with the Mexico state
seal on the cap. Old stuff. Very old.

She took it, her expression enigmatic, tilted it, her eyes on the slosh of
pale golden liquor. The she let her breath out in a slow sigh and tucked
the bottle carefully beneath her loose shirt. “Thank you.” Her obsidian
eyes gave nothing away.

He caught a glimpse of rib bones, faint bruising, and dried, shrunken
flesh, revised his estimate. “You’re welcome.”

“I think you need to leave here.” She looked past him. “We maybe need
to live without your eggs. I’d just go right now.”

He didn’t answer for a moment. Listened to the chuckle of the hens.
“Can I come to dinner tonight?”

“That’s right. You’re crazy. We both know that.” She sighed.

He held the door for her as she lowered herself stiffly and cautiously
into the oven heat of the fading day.

She was right, he thought as he watched her limp through the heat
shimmer, back to the main building. She was definitely right.

He took his time with the chickens, letting them out of their cages to
scratch on the grass carpet and peck at the vitamin crumbles he scat-
tered for them. While he was parked here, they could roam loose in the

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back of the Dragon. He kept the door leading back to their section locked
and all his hens were good about laying in their own cages, although at
this point, he could tell who had laid which egg by sight. By the time he
left the Dragon, the sun was completely down and the first pale stars
winked in the royal blue of the darkening sky. No moon tonight. The wind
had died and he smelled dust and a whiff of roasting meat as his boots
grated on the dusty asphalt of the old main street. He touched the small
hardness of the stunner in his pocket and climbed the sagging porch of
what had once been a store, back when the town had still lived.

They had built a patio of sorts out behind the building, had roofed it
from the sun with metal sheeting stripped from other derelict buildings.
Long tables and old sofas clustered inside the building, shelter from the
sun on the long hot days where residents shelled sunflower seed after
harvest or worked on repair jobs or just visited, waiting for the cool of
evening. He could see the yellow flicker of flame out back through the old
plate-glass windows with their taped cracks.

The moment he entered he felt it — tension like the prickle of static elec-
tricity on a dry, windy day. Paloma was easy, friendly. He let his guard
down sometimes when he was here, sat around the fire pit out back and
shared the mescal he brought, trading swallows with the local stuff, fla-
vored with cactus fruit, that wasn’t all that bad, considering.

Tonight, eyes slid his way, slid aside. The hair prickled on the back of
his neck, but he made his smile easy. “Hola ,” he said, and gave them the
usual grin and wave. “How you all makin’ out?”

“Zip.” Ella heaved herself up from one of the sofas, crossed the floor
with firm strides, hands out, face turning up to kiss his cheeks. Grim de-
termination folded the skin at the comers of her eyes tight. “Glad you
could eat with us. Thanks for that egg today, I feel better already.”

Ah, that was the issue? “Got to keep that blood sugar low.” He gave her
a real hug, because she was so solid, was the core of this settlement,
whether the others realized it or not.

“Come on.” Ella grabbed his arm. “Let’s go out back. Rodriguez got an
antelope, can you believe it? A young buck, no harm done.”

“Meat?” He laughed, made it relaxed and easy, from the belly. “You eat
better than I do. It’s all vat stuff or too pricey to afford, down south. Good
thing maize and beans are in my blood.”

“Hey.” Daren popped in from the firelit back, his eyes bright in the dim
light. “Can my friends come see the chickens?”

My friends. The shy, hopeful pride in those words was so naked that Zi-
pakna almost winced. He could see two or three faces behind Daren. That
same tone had tainted his own voice, back when he had been a govern-
ment scholarship kid from the wilds beyond San Cristobal, one of those
who spoke Spanish as a second language. My friends, such a precious
thing when you did not belong.

“Sure.” He gave Daren a “we’re buddies” grin and shrug. “Any time. You
can show ’em around.” Daren’s eyes betrayed his struggle to look noncha-
lant.

A low chuckle circulated through the room, almost too soft to be heard,
and Ella touched his arm lightly. Approvingly. Zipakna felt the tension re-

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February 2008

lax a bit as he and Ella made their way through the dusk of the building
to the firelit dark out back. One by one the shadowy figures who had
stood back, not greeted him, thawed and followed. He answered greet-
ings, pretending he hadn’t noticed anything, exchanged the usual pleas-
antries that concerned weather and world politics, avoided the real issues
of life. Like illegal crops. One by one, he identified the faces as the warm
red glow of the coals in the firepit lit them. She needed the MS egg from
Negro, he needed the anti-malaria from Seca and so did she. Daren had
appeared at his side, his posture taut, a mix of proprietary and anxious.

“Meat, what a treat, eh?” Zipakna grinned down at Daren as one of the
women laid a charred strip of roasted meat on a plate, dumped a scoop of
beans beside it and added a flat disk of tortilla, thick and chewy and grit-
ty from the bicycle-powered stone mill that the community used to grind
maize into masa.

“Hey, you be careful tomorrow.” She nodded toward a plastic bucket
filled with water, a dipper and cups beside it. “Don’t you let my Jonathan
hurt any of those chickens. He’s so clumsy.”

“I’ll show ’em how to be careful.” Daren took the piled plate she handed
him, practically glowing with pride.

Zipakna smiled at the server. She was another diabetic, like Ella. San-
ja. He remembered her name.

“Watch out for the chutney.” Sanja grinned and pointed at a table full
of condiment dishes. “The sticky red stuff. I told Ella how to make it and
she made us all sweat this year with her pequins.”

“I like it hot.” He smiled for her. “I want to see if it’ll make me sweat.”

“It will.” Daren giggled. “I thought I’d swallowed coals, man.” He carried
his plate to one of the wooden tables, set it down with a possessive confi-
dence beside Zipakna’s.

Usually he sat at a crowded table answering questions, sharing news
that hadn’t yet filtered out here with the few traders, truckers, or wan-
derers who risked the unserviced Dry. Not this time. He chewed the
charred, overdone meat slowly, aware of the way Daren wolfed his food,
how most of the people here ate the same way, always prodded by hunger.
That was how they drank, too, urgently, always thirsty.

Not many of them meant to end up out there. He remembered her
words, the small twin lines that he called her “thinking dimples” creasing
her forehead as she stared into her wine glass. They had plans, they had a
future in mind. It wasn’t this one.

“That isn’t really why you come out here, is it? What you said before —
in your big truck?”

Zipakna started, realized he was staring into space, a forkful of beans
poised in the air. He looked down at Daren, into those clear hazel eyes
that squeezed his heart. She had always known when he wasn’t telling
the truth. “No. It isn’t.” He set the fork down on his plate. “A friend of
mine ... a long time ago . . . went missing out here. I’ve . . . sort of hoped to
rim into her.” At least that was how it had started. Now he looked for her
ghost. Daren was staring at his neck.

“Where did you get that necklace?”

Zipakna touched the carved jade cylinder on its linen cord. “I found it

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diving in an old cenote — that’s a kind of well where people threw offer-
ings to the gods centuries ago. You’re not supposed to dive there, but I was
a kid — sneaking in.”

“Are the cenotes around here?” Daren looked doubtful. “I never heard
of any wells.”

“No, they’re way down south. Where I come from.”

Daren scraped up the last beans from his plate, wiped it carefully with
his tortilla. “Why did your friend come out here?”

“To bring people plants that didn’t need much water.” Zipakna sighed
and eyed the remnants of his dinner. “You want this? I’m not real hungry
tonight.”

Daren gave him another doubting look, then shrugged and dug into the
last of the meat and beans. “She was like Pierre?”

“No!”

The boy flinched and Ziapakna softened his tone. “She created food
plants so that you didn’t need to grow as much to eat well.” And then . . .
she had simply gotten too involved. He closed his eyes, remembering that
bitter bitter fight. “Is your mother here?” He already knew the answer
but Daren’s head shake still pierced him. The boy focused on wiping up
the last molecule of the searing sauce with a scrap of tortilla, shoulders
hunched.

“What are you doing?

At the angry words, Daren’s head shot up and he jerked his hands
away from the plate as if it had burned him.

“I was just talking with him, Pierre.” He looked up, sandy hair falling
back from his face. “He doesn’t mind.”

“I mind.” The tall, skinny man with the dark braid and pale skin
frowned down at Daren. “What have I told you about city folk?”

“But . . .” Daren bit off the word, ducked his head. “I’ll go clean my
plate.” He snatched his plate and cup from the table, headed for the deep-
er shadows along the building.

“You leave him alone.” The man stared down at him, his gray eyes flat
and cold. “We all know about city folk and their appetites.”

Suddenly the congenial chatter that had started up during the meal
ended. Silence hung thick as smoke in the air. “You satisfied my appetite
quite well tonight.” Zipakna smiled gently. “I haven’t had barbecued an-
telope in a long time.”

“You got to wonder.” Pierre leaned one hip against the table, crossed his
arms. “Why someone gives up the nice air conditioning and swimming
pools of the city to come trekking around out here handing out free stuff.
Especially when your rig costs a couple of fortunes.”

Zipakna sighed, made it audible. From the comer of his eye he noticed
Ella, watching h im intently, was aware of the hard lump of the stunner in
his pocket. “I get this every time I meet folk. We already went through it
here, didn’t anyone tell you?”

“Yeah, they did.” Pierre gave him a mirthless smile. “And you want me
to believe that some non-profit in Mexico — Mexico! — cares about us? Not
even our own government does that.”

“It’s all politics.” Zipakna shrugged. “Mexico takes quite a bit of civic

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February 2008

pleasure in the fact that Mexico has to extend aid to US citizens. If the
political situation changes, yeah, the money might dry up. But for now,
people contribute and I come out here. So do a few others like me.” He
looked up, met the man’s cold, gray eyes. “Haven’t you met an altruist at
least once in your life?” he asked softly.

Pierre looked away and his face tightened briefly. “I sure don’t believe
you’re one. You leave my son alone.” He turned on his heel and disap-
peared in the direction Daren had taken.

Zipakna drank his water, skin prickling with the feel of the room. He
looked up as Ella marched over, sat down beside him. “We know you’re
what you say you are.” She pitched her voice to reach everyone. “Me, I’m
looking forward to my egg in the morning, and I sure thank you for keep-
ing an old woman like me alive. Not many care. He’s right about that
much.” She gave Zipakna a small private wink as she squeezed his shoul-
der and stood up. “Sanja and I’ll be there first thing in the morning, right,
Sanja?”

“Yeah.” Sanja’s voice emerged from shadow, a little too bright. “We sure
will”

Zipakna got to his feet and Ella rose with him. “You should all come by
in the morning. Got a new virus northwest of here. It’s high mortality and
it’s moving this way. Spread by birds, so it’ll get here. I have eggs that will
give you immunity.” He turned and headed around the side of the building.

A thin scatter of replies drifted after him and he found Ella walking be-
side him, her hand on his arm. “They change everything,” she said softly.
“The flowers.”

“You know, the sat cams can see them.” He kept his voice low as they
crunched around the side of the building, heading toward the Dragon.
“They measure the light refraction from the leaves and they can tell if
they’re legit or one of the outlaw strains. That’s no accident, Ella. You
don’t realize how much the government and the drug gangs use the same
tools. One or the other will get you.” He shook his head. “You better hope
it’s the government.”

“They haven’t found us yet.”

“The seeds aren’t ready to harvest, are they?”

“Pierre says we’re too isolated.”

Zipakna turned on her. “Nowhere is isolated any more. Not on this en-
tire dirt ball. You ever ask Pierre why he showed up here? Why didn’t he
stay where he was before if he was doing such a good job growing illegal
seeds?”

Ella didn’t answer and he walked on.

“It’s a mistake to let a ghost run your life .” Ella’s voice came low from
the darkness behind him, tinged with sadness.

Zipakna hesitated as the door slid open for him. “Good night, Ella.” He
climbed into its cool interior, listening to the hens’ soft chortle of greeting.

They showed up in the cool of dawn, trickling up to the Dragon in ones
and twos to drink the frothy blend of fruit and soymilk he offered and to
ask shyly about the news they hadn’t asked about last night. A few apol-
ogized. Not many.

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Neither Daren nor Pierre showed up. Zipakna fed the hens, collected
the day’s eggs, and was glad he’d given Daren his immunization egg the
day before. By noon he had run out of things to keep him here. He hiked
over to the community building in the searing heat of noon, found Ella
sewing a shirt in the still heat of the interior, told her goodbye.

“Go with God,” she told him and her face was as seamed and dry as the
land outside.

This settlement would not be here when he next came this way. The old
gods wrote that truth in the dust devils dancing at the edge of the field.
He wondered what stolen genes those seeds carried. He looked for Daren
and Pierre but didn’t see either of them. Tired to the bone, he trudged
back to the Dragon in the searing heat. Time to move on. Put kilometers
between the Dragon and the dangerous magnet of those ripening seeds.

You have a visitor, the Dragon announced as he approached.

He hadn’t locked the door? Zipakna frowned, because he didn’t make
that kind of mistake. Glad that he was still carrying the stunner, he
slipped to the side and opened the door, fingers curled around the smooth
shape of the weapon.

“Ella said you were leaving.” Daren stood inside, Bella in his arms.

“Yeah, I need to move on.” He climbed up, the wash of adrenalin
through his bloodstream telling him just how tense he had been here. “I
have other settlements to visit.”

Daren looked up at him, frowning a little. Then he turned and went
back into the chicken room to put Bella back in her traveling coop. He
scratched her comb, smiled a little as she chuckled at him, and closed
the door. “I think maybe . . . this is yours.” He turned and held out a
hand.

Zipakna stared down at the carved jade cylinder on his palm. It had
been strung on a fine steel chain. She had worn it on a linen cord with
coral beads knotted on either side of it. He swallowed. Shook his head.
“It’s yours.” The words came out husky and rough. “She meant you to
have it.”

“I thought maybe she was the friend you talked about.” Daren closed
his fist around the bead. “She said the same thing you did, I remember.
She said she came out here because no one else would. Did you give it to
her?”

He nodded, squeezing his eyes closed, struggling to swallow the pain
that welled up into his throat. “You can come with me,” he whispered.
“You’re her son. Did she tell you she had dual citizenship — for both the
US and Mexico? You can get citizenship in Mexico. Your DNA will prove
that you’re her son.”

“I’d have to ask Pierre.” Daren looked up at him, his eyes clear, filled
with a maturity far greater than his years. “He won’t say yes. He doesn’t
like the cities and he doesn’t like Mexico even more.”

Zipakna clenched his teeth, holding back the words that he wanted to
use to describe Pierre. Lock the door, he thought. Just leave. Make Daren
understand as they rolled on to the next settlement. “What happened to
her?” he said softly, so softly.

“A border patrol shot her.” Daren fixed his eyes on Bella, who was fuss-

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February 2008

ing and clucking in her cage. “A chopper. They were just flying over, shoot-
ing coyotes. They shot her and me.”

She had a citizen chip. If they’d had their scanner on, they would have
picked up the signal. He closed his eyes, his head filled with roaring. Ya-
hoos out messing around, who was ever gonna check up? Who cared?
When he opened his eyes, Daren was gone, the door whispering closed be-
hind him.

What did any of it matter? He blinked dry eyes and went forward to
make sure the thermosolar plant was powered up. It was. He released the
brakes and pulled into a tight turn, heading southward out of town on the
old, cracked asphalt of the dead road.

He picked up the radio chatter in the afternoon as he fed the hens and
let the unfurled panels recharge the storage batteries. He always lis-
tened, had paid a lot of personal money for the top decryption chip every
trek. He wanted to know who was talking out here and about what.

US border patrol. He listened with half an ear as he scraped droppings
from the crate pans and dumped them into the recycler. He knew the
acronyms, you mostly got US patrols out here. Flower-town. It came over
in a sharp, tenor voice. He straightened, chicken shit spilling from the
dustpan in his hand as he listened. Hard.

Paloma. What else could “Flower-town” be out here? They were going to
hit it. Zipakna stared down at the scattered gray and white turds on the
floor. Stiffly, slowly, he knelt and brushed them into the dust pan. This
was the only outcome. He knew it. Ella knew it. They’d made the choice.
Not many of them meant to end up out there. Her voice murmured in his
ear, so damn earnest. They had plans, they had a future in mind. It wasn’t
this one.

“Shut up!” He bolted to his feet, flung the pan at the wall. “Why did you
have his kid?” The pan hit the wall and shit scattered everywhere. The
hens panicked, squawking and beating at the mesh of their crates. Zi-
pakna dropped to his knees, heels of his hands digging into his eyes until
red light webbed his vision.

Flower-town. It came in over the radio, thin and wispy now, like a ghost
voice.

Zipakna stumbled to his feet, went forward and furled the solar panels.
Powered up and did a tight one-eighty that made the hens squawk all
over again.

The sun sank over the rim of the world, streaking the ochre ground
with long, dark shadows that pointed like accusing fingers. He saw the
smoke in the last glow of the day, mushrooming up in a black flag of
doom. He switched the Dragon to infrared navigation, and the black and
gray images popped up on the heads-up above the console. He was close.
He slowed his speed, wiped sweating palms on his shirt. They’d have a
perimeter alarm set and they’d pick him up any minute now. If they could
claim he was attacking them, they’d blow him into dust in a heartbeat.
He’d run into US government patrols out here before and they didn’t like
the Mexican presence one bit. But his movements were sat-recorded and

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recoverable and Mexico would love to accuse the US of firing on one of its
charity missions in the world media. So he was safe. If he was careful. He
slowed the Dragon even more although he wanted to race. Not that there
would be much he could do.

He saw the flames first and the screen darkened as the nightvision pro-
gram filtered the glare. The community building? More flames sprang to
life in the sunflower fields.

Attention Mexican registry vehicle N45YG90. The crudely accented
Spanish filled the Dragon. You are entering an interdicted area. Police ac-
tion is in progress and no entry is permitted.

Zipakna activated his automatic reply. “I’m sorry. I will stop here. I
have a faulty storage bank and Fm almost out of power. I won’t be able to
go any farther until I can use my panels in the morning.” He sweated in
the silence, the hens clucking softly in the rear.

Stay in your vehicle. The voice betrayed no emotion. Any activity will be
viewed as a hostile act. Understand ?

“Of course.” Zipakna broke the connection. The air in the Dragon
seemed syrupy thick, pressing against his ear drums. They could be scan-
ning him, watching to make sure that he didn’t leave the Dragon. All they
needed was an excuse. He heard a flurry of sharp reports. Gunshots. He
looked up at the screen, saw three quick flashes of light erupt from the
building beyond the burning community center. No, they’d be looking
there. Not here.

Numbly he stood and pulled his protective vest from its storage cubicle
along with a pair of night goggles. He put the Dragon on standby. Just in
case. If he didn’t reactivate it in forty-eight hours, it would send a may-
day back to headquarters. They’d come and collect the hens and the Drag-
on. He looked once around the small, dimly lit space of the Dragon, said a
prayer to the old gods and touched the jade at his throat. Then he touched
the door open, letting in a dry breath of desert that smelled of bitter
smoke, and slipped out into the darkness.

He crouched, moving with the fits and starts of the desert coyotes, pray-
ing again to the old gods that the patrol wasn’t really worrying about
him. Enough clumps of mesquite survived here in this long ago wash to
give him some visual cover from anyone looking in his direction and as he
remembered, the wash curved north and east around the far end of the
old town. It would take him close to the outermost buildings.

It seemed to take a hundred years to reach the tumbledown shack that
marked the edge of the town. He slipped into its deeper shadow. A half
moon had risen and his goggles made the landscape stand out in bright
black and gray and white. The gunfire had stopped. He slipped from the
shed to the fallen ruins of an old house, to the back of an empty storefront
across from the community building. It was fully in flames now and his
goggles damped the fight as he peered cautiously from the glassless front
window. Figures moved in the street, dressed in military coveralls. They
had herded a dozen people together at the end of the street and Zipakna
saw the squat, boxy shapes of two big military choppers beyond them.

They would not have a good future, would become permanent residents
of a secure resettlement camp somewhere. He touched his goggles, his

The Egg Man

February 2008

stomach lurching as he zoomed in on the bedraggled settlers. He recog-
nized Sanja, didn’t see either Ella or Daren, but he couldn’t make out too
many faces in the huddle. If the patrol had them, there was nothing he
could do. They were searching the buildings on this side of the street. He
saw helmeted figures cross the street, heading for the building next to his
vantage point.

Zipakna slipped out the back door, made his way to the next building,
leaned through the sagging window opening. “Daren? Ella? It’s Zip,” he
said softly. “Anyone there?” Silence. He didn’t dare raise his voice, moved
on to the next building, his skin tight, expecting a shouted command. If
they caught him interfering they’d arrest him. It might be a long time
before Mexico got him freed. His bosses would be very unhappy with
him.

“Ella?” He hurried, scrabbling low through fallen siding, tangles of old
junk. They weren’t here. The patrol must have made a clean sweep. He
felt a brief, bitter stab of satisfaction that they had at least caught Pierre.
One would deserve his fate, anyway.

Time to get back to the Dragon. As he turned, he saw two shadows slip
into the building he had just checked — one tall, one child short. Hope
leaped in his chest, nearly choking him. He bent low and sprinted, trying
to gauge the time . . . how long before the patrol soldiers got to this build-
ing? He reached a side window, its frame buckled. As he did, a slight fig-
ure scrambled over the broken sill and even in the black and white of
nightvision, Zipakna recognized Daren’s fair hair.

The old gods had heard him. He grabbed the boy, hand going over his
mouth in time to stifle his cry. “It’s me. Zip. Be silent,” he hissed.

Light flared in the building Daren had just left. Zipakna’s goggles fil-
tered it and crouching in the dark, clutching Daren, he saw Pierre stand
up straight, hands going into the air. “All right, I give up. You got me.” Two
uniformed patrol pointed stunners at Pierre.

Daren’s whimper was almost but not quite soundless. “Don’t move,” Zi-
pakna breathed. If they hadn’t seen Daren . . .

“You’re the one who brought the seeds.” The taller of the two lowered
his stunner and pulled an automatic from a black holster on his hip. “We
got an ID on you.”

A gun? Zipakna stared at it as it rose in seeming slow motion, the muz-
zle tracking upward to Pierre’s stunned face. Daren lunged in his grip
and he yanked the boy down and back, hurling him to the ground. The
stunner seemed to have leaped from his pocket to his hand and the tiny
dart hit the man with the gun smack in the center of his chest. A projec-
tile vest didn’t stop a stunner charge. The man’s arms spasmed outward
and the ugly automatic went sailing, clattering to the floor. Pierre dived
for the window as the other patrol yanked out his own weapon and point-
ed it at Zipakna. He fired a second stun charge but as he did, something
slammed into his shoulder and threw him backward. Distantly he heard
a loud noise, then Daren was trying to drag him to his feet.

“Let’s go.” Pierre yanked him upright.

“This way.” Zipakna pointed to the distant bulk of the Dragon.

They ran. His left side was numb but there was no time to think about

Mary Rosenblum

Asimov's

that. Daren and Pierre didn’t have goggles so they ran behind him. He
took them through the mesquite, ignoring the thorn slash, praying that
the patrol focused on the building first before they started scanning the
desert. His back twitched with the expectation of a bullet.

The Dragon opened to him and he herded them in, gasping for breath
now, the numbness draining away, leaving slow, spreading pain in its
wake. “In here.” He touched the hidden panel and it opened, revealing the
coffin-shaped space beneath the floor. The Dragon was defended, but this
was always the backup. Not even a scan could pick up someone hidden
here. “You’ll have to both fit. There’s air.” They managed it, Pierre clasp-
ing Daren close, the boy’s face buried against his shoulder. Pierre looked
up as the panel slid closed. “Thanks.” The panel clicked into place.

Zipakna stripped off his protective vest. Blood soaked his shirt. They
were using piercers. That really bothered him, but fortunately the vest
had slowed the bullet enough. He slapped a blood-stop patch onto the in-
jury, waves of pain washing through his head, making him dizzy. Did a
stim-tab from the med closet and instantly straightened, pain and dizzi-
ness blasted away by the drug. Didn’t dare hide the bloody shirt, so he
pulled a loose woven shirt over his head. Visitor, the Dragon announced.
US Security ID verified.

“Open.” Zipakna leaned a hip against the console, aware of the heads-up
that still showed the town. The building had collapsed into a pile of glow-
ing embers and dark figures darted through the shadows. “Come in.” He
said it in English with a careful US accent. “You’re really having quite a
night over there.” He stood back as two uniformed patrol burst into the
Dragon while a third watched warily from the doorway. All carrying stun-
ners.

Not guns, so maybe, just maybe, they hadn’t been spotted.

“What are you up to?” The patrol in charge, a woman, stared at him
coldly through the helmet shield. “Did you leave this vehicle or let anyone
in?”

The gods had come through. Maybe. “Goodness, no.” He arched his eye-
brows. “I’m not that crazy. I’m still stunned that Paloma went to raising
pharm .” He didn’t have to fake the bitterness. “That’s why you’re burning
the fields, right? They’re a good bunch of people. I didn’t think they’d ever
give in to that.”

Maybe she heard the truth in his words, but for whatever reason, the
leader relaxed a hair. “Mind if we look around?” It wasn’t a question and
he shrugged, stifling a wince at the pain that made it through the stimu-
lant buzz.

“Sure. Don’t scare the hens, okay?”

The two inside the Dragon searched, quickly and thoroughly. They
checked to see if he had been recording video and Zipakna said thanks to
the old gods that he hadn’t activated it. That would have changed things,
he was willing to bet.

“You need help with your battery problem?” The cold faced woman — a
lieutenant, he noticed her insignia — asked him.

He shook his head. Tm getting by fine as long as I don’t travel at night.
They store enough for life support.”

The Egg Man

February 2008

“I’d get out of here as soon as the sun is up.” She jerked her head at the
other two. “Any time you got illegal flowers you get raiders. You don’t
want to mess with them.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He ducked his head. “I sure will do that.” He didn’t move
as they left, waited a half hour longer just to be sure that they didn’t pop
back in. But they did not. Apparently they believed his story, hadn’t seen
their wild dash through the mesquite. He set the perimeter alert to max-
imum and opened the secret panel. Daren scrambled out first, his face
pale enough that his freckles stood out like bits of copper on his skin.

Her freckles.

Zipakna sat down fast. When the stim ran out, you crashed hard. The
room tilted, steadied.

“That guy shot you.” Daren’s eyes seemed to be all pupil. “Are you going
to die?”

“You got medical stuff?” Pierre’s face swam into view. “Tell me quick,
okay?”

“The cupboard to the left of the console.” The words came out thick.
Daren was staring at his chest. Zipakna looked down. Red was soaking
into the ivory weave of the shirt he’d put on. So much for the blood-stop.
The bullet must have gone deeper than he thought, or had hit a small
artery. Good thing his boarders hadn’t stuck around longer.

Pierre had the med kit. Zipakna started to pull the shirt off over his
head and the pain hit him like a lightning strike, sheeting his vision with
white. He saw the pale green arch of the ceiling, thought I’m falling . . .

He woke in his bed, groping drowsily for where he was headed and
what he had drunk that made his head hurt this bad. Blinked as a face
swam into view. Daren. He pushed himself up to a sitting position, his
head splitting.

“You passed out.” Daren’s eyes were opaque. “Pierre took the bullet out
of your shoulder while you were out. You bled a lot but he said you won’t
die.”

“Where’s Pierre?” He swung his legs over the side of the narrow bed,
fighting dizziness. “How long have I been out?”

“Not very long.” Daren backed away. “The chickens are okay. I looked.”

“Thanks.” Zipakna made it to his feet, steadied himself with a hand on
the wall. A quick check of the console said that Pierre hadn’t messed
with anything. It was light out. Early morning. He set the video to
sweep, scanned the landscape. No choppers, no trace of last night’s
raiders. He watched the images pan across the heads-up; blackened
fields, the smoldering pile of embers and twisted plumbing that had
been the community center, still wisping smoke. The fire had spread to a
couple of derelict buildings to the windward of the old store. Movement
snagged his eye. Pierre. Digging. He slapped the control, shut off the vid.
Daren was back with the chickens. “Stay here, okay? I’m afraid to leave
them alone.”

“Okay.” Daren’s voice came to him, hollow as an empty eggshell.

He stepped out into the oven heat, his head throbbing in time to his
footsteps as he crossed the sunbaked ground to the empty bones of Palo-

Mary Rosenblum

Asimov's

ma. A red bandanna had snagged on a mesquite branch, flapping in the
morning’s hot wind. He saw a woman’s sandal lying on the dusty asphalt
of the main street, a faded red backpack. He picked it up, looked inside.
Empty. He dropped it, crossed the street, angling northward to where he
had seen Pierre digging.

He had just about finished two graves. A man lay beside one. The blood
that soaked his chest had turned dark in the morning heat. Zipakna rec-
ognized his grizzled red beard and thinning hair, couldn’t remember his
name. He didn’t eat any of the special eggs, just the ones against whatev-
er new bug was out there. Pierre climbed out of the shallow grave.

“You shouldn’t be walking around.” He pushed dirty hair out of his
eyes.

Without a word, Zipakna moved to the man’s ankles. Pierre shrugged,
took the man’s shoulders. He was stiflj his flesh plastic and too cold, never
mind the morning heat. Without a word they lifted and swung together,
lowered him into the fresh grave. It probably wouldn’t keep the coyotes
out, Zipakna thought. But it would slow them down. He straightened,
stepped over to the other grave.

Ella. Her face looked sad, eyes closed. He didn’t see any blood, won-
dered if she had simply suffered a heart attack, if she had had enough as
everything she had worked to keep intact burned around her. “Did Daren
see her die?” He said it softly. Felt rather than saw Pierre’s flinch.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” He stuck the shovel into the piled rocks
and dirt, tossed the first shovelful into the hole.

Zipakna said the right words in rhythm to the grating thrust of the
shovel. First the Catholic prayer his mother would have wanted him to
say, then the words for the old gods. Then a small, hard prayer for the
new gods who had no language except dust and thirst and the ebb and
flow of world politics that swept human beings from the chess board of
the earth like pawns.

“You could have let them shoot me.” Pierre tossed a last shovelful of dirt
onto Ella’s grave. “Why didn’t you?”

Zipakna tilted his gaze to the hard blue sky. “Daren.” Three tiny black
specks hung overhead. Vultures. Death called them. “I’ll make you a
trade. I’ll capitalize you to set up as a trader out here. You leave the
pharm crops alone. I take Daren with me and get him Mexican citizen-
ship. Give him a future better than yours.”

“You can’t.” Pierre’s voice was low and bitter. “I tried. Even though his
mother was a US citizen, they’re not taking in offspring born out here.
Mexico has a fifteen year waiting list for new immigrants.” He was star-

The Egg Man

February 2008

ing down at the mounded rock and dust of Ella’s grave. “She was so an-
gry when she got pregnant. The implant was faulty, I guess. She meant to
go back to the city before he was bom but ... I got hurt. And she stuck
around.” He was silent for awhile. “Then it was too late, Daren was bom
and the US had closed the border. We’re officially out here because we
want to be.” His lips twisted.

“Why did you come out here?”

He looked up. Blinked. “My parents lived out here. They were the
mgged individual types, I guess.” He shrugged. “I went into the city, got a
job, and they were still letting people come and go then. I didn’t like it, all
the people, all the restrictions. So I came back out here.” He gave a thin
laugh. “I was a trader to start with. I got hit by a bunch of raiders. That’s
when ... I got hurt. Badly. I’m sorry.” He turned away. “I wish you could
get him citizenship. He didn’t choose this.”

“I can.” Zipakna watched Pierre halt without turning. “She . . . was my
wife. We married in Oaxaca.” The words were so damn hard to say. “That
gave her automatic dual citizenship. In Mexico, only the mother’s DNA is
required as proof of citizenship. We’re pragmatists,” he said bitterly.

For a time, Pierre said nothing. Finally he turned, his face as empty as
the landscape. “You’re the one.” He looked past Zipakna, toward the Drag-
on. “I don’t like you, you know. But I think . . . you’ll be a good father for
Daren. Better than I’ve been.” He looked down at the dirty steel of the
shovel blade. “It’s a deal. A trade. I’ll sell you my kid. Because it’s a good
deal for him.” He walked past Zipakna toward the Dragon, tossed the
shovel into the narrow strip of shade along one of the remaining build-
ings. The clang and rattle as it hit sounded loud as mountain thunder in
the quiet of the windless heat.

Zipakna followed slowly, his shoulder hurting. Ilena would be pissed,
would never believe that Daren wasn’t his. His mouth crooked with the
irony of that. The old gods twisted time and lives into the intricate knots
of the universe and you could meet yourself coming around any comer. As
the Dragon’s doorway opened with a breath of cool air, he heard Pierre’s
voice from the chicken room, low and intense against the cluck and chor-
tle of the hens, heard Daren’s answer, heard the brightness in it.

Zipakna went forward to the console to ready the Dragon for travel. As
soon as they reached the serviced lands again he’d transfer his savings to
a cash card for Pierre. Pierre could buy what he needed on the Pima’s
land. They didn’t care if you were a Drylander or not.

Ilena would be doubly pissed. But he was a good poker partner and she
wouldn’t dump him. And she’d like Daren. Once she got past her jealousy.
Ilena had always wanted a kid, just never wanted to take the time to
have one.

He wondered if she had meant to contact him, tell him about Daren,
bring the boy back to Mexico. She would have known, surely, that it would
have been all right.

Surely. He sighed and furled the solar wings.

Maybe he would keep coming out here. If Daren wanted to. Maybe her
ghost would find them as they traveled through this place she had loved.
And then he could ask her. O

Mary Rosenblum

Edward Lerner's novels indude Probe , Moonstruck, and
(in collaboration with Larry Niven) Fleet of Worlds. His
short fiction has appeared in Analog, Artemis, and Jim
Baen's Universe magazines, on Amazon Shorts, in the
anthologies Year's Best SF 7 and Future Washington,
and in his 2006 collection Creative Destruction. He tells
us that in the pipeline are the novels Fools' Experiments,
Small Miracles, and (with Larry Niven) Juggler of Worlds.
In his first story for Asimov's, the author looks at the
complicated and strange goings-on . . .

INSIDE THE
BOX

Edward M. Lerner

r he lecture hall was pleasantly warm. Behind Thaddeus Fitch, busily
writing on the chalkboard, pencils scratched earnestly in spiral note-
books, fluorescent lights hummed, and feet shuffled. A Beach Boys tune
wafted in through open windows from the quad.

Or so, in any case, the professor imagined the lecture hall. Chittering,
muttering students squirming in their seats this morning drowned out
the customary sounds. Or what he thought he remembered to be the cus-
tomary sounds . . .

Chalk squeaked as Thaddeus, with more energy than artistry, began
sketching a stick-figure quadruped. “I’ll explain this cat momentarily,
class.” Shrodinger’s thought-experiment cat. Today’s Introduction to
Physics lecture introduced the counterintuitive topic of quantum me-
chanics. “Recall from your reading that the behavior of atoms and then-
constituent parts cannot be fully described by such conventional charac-
teristics as position and momentum. More precisely, how we think about
those descriptive terms must change.” He continued drawing as he spoke,
the cube in which he was attempting to enclose the cat somewhat out of
perspective. He winced as the chalk snapped, its tip caught by the hole
that should not be there. Should it?

“In classical physics, we can, with sufficient care and expense, measure
to arbitrary precision the position and momentum of any particle. At suf-
ficiently tiny scales, however, nature does not behave as we expect. In-
stead, in those infinitesimal domains, we discover that certain parame-

February 2008

ters exhibit heretofore imperceptible granularity or lumpiness — what
physicists call quantization. Further, we cannot measure at quantum
scales without influencing whatever is being measured. The math is in-
appropriate for” — beyond — “this class, but a consequence of quantization
is that we cannot have absolute knowledge of subatomic particles.”

His crude diagram complete, Thaddeus pivoted to face the packed au-
ditorium. “If we know an electron’s position quite exactly, we can know lit-
tle about its momentum. If we know its momentum, we can tell little
about where it is. We are reduced to probabilistic descriptions of where
the particle may be, and where it may be going.” Doggedly, he ignored the
arm waving from the second tier of seats. “But can this uncertainty man-
ifest itself in the macroscopic world we experience? That is what Erwin
Shrodinger set out to consider. . . ”

“Professor.” Young Mr. McDowell’s tone, although respectful, was quite
insistent. The sophomore stood to emphasize his seriousness. “We — the
class, that is — we feel we should discuss yesterday’s events.”

A flood of . . . memories? . . . displaced whatever the student said next. A
near-miss handgun attack. A flung knife by chance impaling a pigeon in-
opportunely availing itself of the open window. A hurtling hand grenade
vanished in mid-arc.

Thaddeus shook himself by the mental lapels. Nonsense. Pointing at
the board, he continued. “Returning to today’s subject, Dr. Shrodinger de-
vised a thought experiment to illustrate quantum uncertainty. My car-
toon reveals the inside of the box, but imagine that its walls are quite
opaque, quite impenetrable.” Beside the stick-figure cat, he drew a tiny
square. “This mechanism contains a bit of radioactive material. Detection
of a single radioactive decay” and he tapped the board once with his chalk
stump, “releases poisonous gas.”

He was explaining a decay event as a particle’s spontaneous emission
from an atomic nucleus — a manifestation of positional uncertainty —
when murmurs of protestation stopped him. Hairs rose on the nape of his
neck. In the otherwise jammed hall, one cluster of seats remained unoc-
cupied. It was where something had happened.

Only it couldn’t have.

Mr. McDowell was still, or once again, on his feet. He followed Thad-
deus’ gaze to the empty few chairs. “We don’t understand about him ei-
ther, sir. The . . . intruder.”

Heads nodded. Voices rang out in agreement. A hundred pairs of eyes
beseeched Thaddeus. He relented. “My unborn grandson, you mean. It’s
impossible, you know.”

“But professor . . .”

With outstretched arm and firm voice, Thaddeus interrupted. “You know
what you saw, you were going to insist. What you, and your colleagues in
later sections of the class, all saw. Or what, rather, you’ve now convinced
yourselves you saw, after repeated retellings of the tale.” He lowered his
arm and voice. “Surely there is a simpler explanation than the impossible.

“A time-travel lecture, illustrated with the grandfather paradox, in a
hot, stuffy classroom. A passing car backfires. A guest audits the lecture,
someone with red hair like mine. Thrill-seeking students attend later sec-
tions of the lecture, and their rumor-fed expectations stoke our own
fevered imaginations.”

Asimov's

Thaddeus took a deep breath. “What I, too, admit to remembering did
not happen. It cannot have happened. This can only have been an in-
stance of mass hysteria.”

“Like UFO sightings,” someone called out.

“Or the Salem witch trials,” Thaddeus agreed. Better a moment of soft-
headed gullibility than to deny causality. Not that he cared for either of
his options . . .

Young McDowell persisted. “Professor, the blackboard has a bullet hole.
And how do you explain that the attacks stopped? They ended — you end-
ed them — when you announced you would never have children.”

Thaddeus braced himself against his lectern. “A hole was surely in the
board all along, unnoticed until the suggestive backfire. And our visitor
likely vanished by no more mysterious a means than,” and he gestured to
the rear of the auditorium, “that rear exit door.” Still, his memory insisted
his doppelganger had disappeared — to the future? — from beneath a pile-
up of angry students. “Would you choose to re-experience our welcome?”

That drew nervous giggles.

“Ladies and gentlemen, yesterday we spoke about cause and effect.
Now you claim that my grandson traveled through time to kill me, and
that I defeated his attack by my declaration I would have no children.

“If so, no grandson ever traveled back to cause my decision. Will I still
make that decision? Might I now have children?” Doubts blossomed on
their faces, and he hammered the figurative nail into the metaphorical
coffin. “How, if I halted the attacks by deciding never to have children, can
you remember my grandson?”

Whispering stopped as Thaddeus rapped the oaken lectern. “Back to
Schrodinger’s cat. Has an electron, its exact position uncertain, chanced
to manifest itself outside an atomic nucleus? That is, has a radioactive de-
cay occurred to cause release of the poisonous gas? Remember, we cannot
see inside the box. Class?”

Confusion returned, but of a more academic nature than the controversy
just concluded. (Concluded, mocked some comer of Thaddeus’ thoughts, or
simply set aside?)

“A show of hands, please. Who thinks the cat is alive?” A few hands rose
tentatively. “And who thinks the cat is dead?” More hands. “Not everyone
expressed an opinion. Do the rest of you imagine it’s a vampire cat— the
undead?”

The chuckle was overlong and overloud. He wasn’t the only one still on
edge. “In the closed system of the sealed box, we cannot know the cat’s
status. Neither living nor dead is the correct answer — at least by the for-
malism of quantum mechanics. There is only probability until the box is
opened and an outcome observed. Until then, all possible outcomes are
said by physicists to be in superposition.”

A familiar arm waggled. Thaddeus managed not to sigh. “Yes, Mr. Mc-
Dowell.”

“But what does it mean?”

“The math of quantum mechanics is crisp, beautiful, and wonderfully
predictive. What is not clear,” what not even Albert Einstein could dis-
cern, “is the physical meaning of that mathematical formalism. Some ar-
gue that to ask the question is impermissible. Some assert that the realm
of quantum mechanics is so removed from our senses we’re unequipped

February 2008

to judge "That, of course, was why Schrodinger devised the cat in the box.
A cat is not a subatomic particle

Why did his mind keep wandering?

“There are several interpretations, all improvable, of the mathematical
formalism. Living or dead: To have but one outcome when the box is
opened is unaesthetically asymmetric. Hence, one theory has it that both
outcomes occur — which implies the spawning of another universe. More
generally, whenever an uncertainty at the quantum level must resolve it-
self into a particular result, the universe itself must split into many, one
to instantiate each possible outcome. If we, the occupants of one universe,
unseal the box to let loose a live cat, in another universe, the occupants
must encounter a dead feline.”

More murmuring. This time Thaddeus let bewilderment run its course. As
young minds grappled with countless myriads of branching universes new-
born each moment, into Thaddeus’ own churning mind popped the vision of
two commingled universes. Of two possible professors in superposition.
From what source might free will arise, except for quantum uncertainty?

Children or not? Memories or hallucination? A bullet hole or just a hole?

Clanging yanked his attention back to the lecture hall. An unseason-
ably warm autumn day and an alarm: almost surely a fire drill. “Atten-
tion, everyone! Leave in an orderly fashion. Assemble on the quad.” Thad-
deus watched the students stand, form lines, file efficiently from the
room, his eyes sweeping from exit to exit to exit. His thoughts remained
in turmoil.

“Mr. McDowell!” The lad was at the blackboard. Had he likewise con-
cluded this must be a fire drill? “Cease your foolishness and go now.”
Thaddeus’ eyes resumed their sweep. When his gaze next touched the
front of the auditorium, the area was empty. A hastily scrawled phrase
had appeared below Shrodinger’s cat. He squinted to read it.

Now what had he been thinking about?

The students filtered back from the sunny quad into the hall. A few
glanced unsubtly at the wall clock. The hour was almost up. He could
have dismissed them straight from the quad, instead of squeezing in a fi-
nal few minutes of lecture.

“A pleasant day for a fire drill.” Thaddeus picked up a piece of chalk.
“Where were we?”

Tittering erupted as he looked to the flawless blackboard. His face,
thankfully hidden from the class, reddened. “Quite clever.” He briskly
erased the scribbled graffito that had appeared beneath his crudely drawn
sketch of Shrodinger’s cat. The chuckling grew. “Very clever, indeed.”

He wished he had dismissed them from the quad. A minute later the
bell rang, ending the session. Grinning students in twos and threes bus-
tled from the hall.

His humble drawing followed the student witticism into oblivion. Not
that it mattered; the caption had been memorable enough. Straightening
a sheaf of lecture notes, Thaddeus wondered whether even Einstein
would have agreed.

“The cat knows.” O

Edward M. Lerner

THE LAST
AMERICAN

John Kessel

John Kessel co-directs the creative writing program at
North Carolina State University in Raleigh. His fiction has
received the Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon
Award, the Locus Poll Award, and his October/November
2002 Asimov's novella, "Stories for Men," was the win-
ner of the James Tiptree Jr. Award. Another Asimov's
story, "A Clean Escape" (May 1985), was the first
episode of last summer's ABC television series Masters
of Science Fiction. John's books include Good News
from Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and The Pure
Product. Most recently, with James Patrick Kelly, he
edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange: The
Slipstream Anthology and Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk
Anthology. His next short story collection. The Baum
Plan for Financial Independence will be out soon from
Small Beers Press. The author's latest story for us takes
a grim and brutal look at a master manipulator.

A word of warning: there are scenes in this story
that may be disturbing to some readers.

The Life of Andrew Steele
Recreated by Fiona 13
Reviewed by The OldGuy

“I don’t blame my father for beating me. I don’t blame him for tearing
the book I was reading from my hands, and I don’t blame him for lock-
ing me in the basement. When I was a child, I did blame him. I was an-

February 2008

gry, and I hated my father. But as I grew older I came to understand
that he did what was right for me, and now I look upon him with respect
and love, the respect and love he always deserved, hut that I was unable
to give him because I was too young and self-centered to grasp it.”

— Andrew Steele, 2077
Conversation with Hagiographer

Lluring the thirty-three years Andrew Steele occupied the Oval Office
of what was then called the White House, in what was then called the
United States of America (not to be Gonfused with the current United
State of Americans), on the comer of his desk he kept an antiquated de-
vice of the early twenty-first century called a taser. Typically used by law
enforcement officers, it functioned by shooting out a thin wire that, once
in contact with its target, delivered an electric shock of up to three hun-
dred thousand volts. The victim was immediately incapacitated by mus-
cle spasms and intense pain. This crude weapon was used for crowd con-
trol or to subdue suspects of crimes.

When Ambassador for the New Humanity Mona Vaidyanathan first
visited Steele, she asked what the queer black object was. Steele told her
that it had been the most frequent means of communication between his
father and himself. “When I was ten years old,” he told her, “within a sin-
gle month my father used that on me sixteen times.”

“That’s horrible,” she said.

“Not for a person with a moral imagination,” Steele replied.

In this new biography of Steele, Fiona 13, the Grand Lady of Reproduc-
tions, presents the crowning achievement of her long career recreating
lives for the Cognosphere. Andrew Steele, when he died in 2100, had
come to exemplify the twenty-first century, and his people, in a way that
goes beyond the metaphorical. Drawing on every resource of the posthu-
man biographer, from heuristic modeling to reconstructive DNA sam-
pling to forensic dreaming, Ms. 13 has produced this labor of, if not love,
then obsession, and I, for one, am grateful for it.

Fiona presents her new work in a hybrid form. Comparatively little of
this biography is subjectively rendered. Instead, harking back to a bygone
era, Fiona breaks up the narrative with long passages of text — strings of
printed code that must be read with the eyes. Of course this adds the bur-
den of learning the code to anyone seeking to experience her recreation,
but an accelerated prefrontal intervention is packaged with the biography.
Fiona maintains that text, since it forces an artificial linearity on experi-
ence, stimulates portions of the left brain that seldom function in conven-
tional experiential biographies. The result is that the person undergoing
the life of Andrew Steele both lives through significant moments in
Steele’s subjectivity, and is drawn out of the stream of sensory and emo-
tional reaction to contemplate the significance of that experience from the
point of view of a wise commentator.

I trust I do not have to explain the charms of this form to those of you
reading this review, but I recommend the experience to all cognizant en-
tities who still maintain elements of curiosity in their affect repertoire.

John Kessel

Asimov's

CHILDHOOD

/"Appropriately for a man who was to so personify the twenty-first century,
Dwight Andrew Steele was bom on January 1, 2001. His mother, Rosamund
Sanchez Steele, originally from Mexico, was a lab technician at the forestry
school at North Carolina State University; his father, Herbert Matthew
Steele, was a land developer and on the board of the Planter’s Bank and
Trust. Both of Steele’s parents were devout Baptists and attended one of
the new “big box” churches that had sprung up in the late twentieth in re-
sponse to growing millennialist beliefs in the United States and elsewhere.

The young Steele was “home schooled.” This meant that Steele’s moth-
er devoted a portion of every day to teaching her son herself. The public
school system was distrusted by large numbers of religious believers, who
considered education by the state to be a form of indoctrination in moral
error. Home schoolers operated from the premise that the less contact
their children had with the larger world, the better.

Unfortunately, in the case of Andrew this did not prevent him from
meeting other children. Andrew was a small, serious boy, sensitive, and
an easy target for bullies. This led to his first murder. Fiona 13 realizes
this event for us through extrapolative genetic mapping.

We are in the playground, on a bright May morning. We are run-
ning across the crowded asphalt toward a climbing structure of wood
and metal, when suddenly we are falling! A nine-year-old boy named
Jason Terry has tripped us and, when we regain our feet, he tries to
pull our pants down. We feel the sting of our elbows where they
scraped the pavement; feel surprise and dismay, fear, anger. As Terry
leans forward to grab the waistband of our trousers, we suddenly
bring our knee up into Terry’s face. Terry falls back, sits down awk-
wardly. The other children gathered laugh. The sound of the laughter
in our ears only enrages us more — are they laughing at us? The look of
dismay turns to rage on Terry’s face. He is going to beat us up, now, he
is a deadly threat. We step forward, and before Terry can stand, kick
him full in the face. Terry’s head snaps back and strikes the asphalt,
and he is still.

The children gasp. A trickle of blood flows from beneath Terry’s ear.
From across the playground comes the monitor’s voice: “Andrew? An-
drew Steele?”

I have never experienced a more vivid moment in biography. There it
all is: the complete assumption by Steele that he is the victim. The fear
and rage. The horror, quickly repressed. The later remorse, swamped by
desperate justifications.

It was only through his father’s political connections and acquiescence
in private counseling (that the Steeles did not believe in, taking psychol-
ogy as a particularly pernicious form of modern mumbo jumbo) that An-
drew was kept out of the legal system. He withdrew into the family, his
father’s discipline, and his mother’s teaching.

The Last American

February 2008

More trouble was to follow. Keeping it secret from his family, Herbert
Steele had invested heavily in real estate in the late oughts; he had lever-
aged properties he purchased to borrow money to invest in several hedge
funds, hoping to put the family into a position of such fundamental
wealth that they would be beyond the reach of economic vagaries.

When the Friends of the American League set off the Atlanta nuclear
blast in 2012, pushing the first domino of the Global Economic Meltdown,
Steele senior’s financial house of cards collapsed. The U.S. government,
having spent itself into bankruptcy and dependence on Asian debt sup-
port through ill-advised imperial schemes and paranoid reactions to glob-
al terrorist threats, had no resources to deal with the collapse of private
finances. Herbert Steele struggled to deal with the reversal, fell into a de-
pression, and died when he crashed a borrowed private plane into a golf
course in Southern Pines.

Andrew was twelve years old. His mother, finding part time work as a
data entry clerk, made barely enough money to keep them alive. Andrew
was forced into the public schools. He did surprisingly well there. Andrew
always seemed mature for his years, deferential to his elders, responsible,
trustworthy, and able to see others’ viewpoint. He was slightly aloof from
his classmates, and seemed more at home in the presence of adults.

Unknown to his overstressed mother, Andrew was living a secret life.
On the Internet, under a half dozen false IP addresses, he maintained po-
litical websites. Through them he became one of the world’s most influen-
tial “bloggers.”

A blog was a personal web log, a site on the worldwide computer system
where individuals, either anonymously or in their own names, commented
on current affairs or their own fives. Some of these weblogs had become
prominent, and their organizers and authors politically important.

Andrew had a fiction writer’s gift for inventing consistent personalities,
investing them with brilliant argument and sharp observation. On the
“Political Theater” weblog, as Sacre True, he argued for the impeachment
of President Harrison; on “Reason Season,” as Tom Pain, he demonstrated
why Harrison’s impeachment would prove disastrous. Fiona sees this
phase of Steele’s fife as his education in manipulating others’ sensibilities.
His emotion-laden arguments were astonishingly successful at twisting his
interlocutors into rhetorical knots. To unravel and respond to one of Steele’s
arguments rationally would take four times his space, and carry none of his
propagandistic force. Steele’s argument against the designated hitter rule
even found its way into the platform of the resurgent Republican Party.

INTERROGATOR

“You don't know why I acted, but I know why. I acted because it is nec-
essary for me to act, because that’s what, whether you like it or not, you
require me to do. And I don’t mind doing it because it’s what I have to
do. It’s what I was bom to do. I’ve never been appreciated for it but that’s
okay too because, frankly, no one is ever appreciated for what they do.

John Kessel

Asimov's

“But before you presume to judge me realize that you are responsible. I
am simply your instrument. I took on the burden of your desires when I
didn't want to — I would just as gladly have had that cup pass me by —
but I did it, and I have never complained. And I have never felt less than
proud of what I have done. I did what was necessary, for the benefit of
others. If it had been up to me I would never have touched a single hu-
man being, but I am not complaining

“I do however ask you, humbly, if you have any scrap of decency left, if
you have any integrity whatsoever, not to judge me. You do not have that
right.

“Ask Carlo Sanchez, ask Alfonso Garadiana, ask Sayid Ramachan-
dran, ask Billy Chen. Ask them what was the right thing to do. And
then, when you’ve got the answer from their bleeding corpses, then, and
only then, come to me.”

— Andrew Steele, 2020
Statement before Board of Inquiry

ontemporary readers must remember the vast demographic and other
circumstantial differences that make the early twenty-first century an
alien land to us. When Steele was sixteen years old, the population of the
world was an astonishing 6.8 billion, fully half of whom were under the
age of twenty-five, the overwhelming majority of those young and striv-
ing individuals living in poverty, but with access, through the technolo-
gies that had spread widely over the previous twenty years, to unprece-
dented unregulated information. Few of them could be said to have been
adequately acculturated. The history of the next forty years, including
Steele’s part in that history, was shaped by this fact.

In 2017, Steele was conscripted into the U.S. army pursuing the Oil
War on two continents. Because he was fluent in Spanish, he served as an
interrogator with the 71 st infantry division stationed in Venezuela. His
history as an interrogator included the debriefing of the rightfully elected
president of that nation in 2019. Fiona puts us there:

We are standing in the back of a small room with concrete walls,
banks of fluorescent lights above, a HVAC vent and exposed ducts
hanging from the ceiling. The room is cold. We have been standing for
a long time and our back is stiff. We have seen many of these sessions,
and all we can think about right now is getting out of here, getting a
beer and getting some sleep.

In the center of the room Lieutenant Haslop and a civilian contractor
are interrogating a small brown man with jet-black shoulder length
hair. Haslop is very tall and stoop shouldered, probably from a lifetime
of ducking responsibility. The men call him “Slop” behind his back.

The prisoner’s name is Alfonso Garadiana. His wrists are tied togeth-
er behind him, and the same rope stretches down to his ankles, also tied
together. The rope is too short, so that the only way he can stand is with
his knees fleoced painfully. But every time he sways, as if to fall, the con-
tractor signals Haslop, who pokes him with an electric prod. Flecks of

The Last American

February 2008

blood spot Garadiana’ s once brilliant white shirt. A cut over his eyebrow
is crusted with dried blood, and the eye below it is half-closed.

The contractor, Mr. Gray, is neat and shaved and in control. “So,” he
says in Spanish, “where are the Jacaranda virus stores?”

Garadiana does not answer. It’s unclear whether he has even un-
derstood.

Gray nods to Haslop again.

Haslop blinks his eyes, swallows. He slumps into a chair, rests his
brow in one hand. “I can’t do this anymore,” he mutters, only apparently
to himself. He wouldn’t say it aloud if he didn’t want us to hear it, even
if he doesn’t know that himself. We are sick to death of his weakness.

We step forward and take the prod from his hand. “Let me take care
of this, sir.” We swing the back of our hand against Garadiana’ s face,
exactly the same motion we once used to hit a backhand in high school
tennis. The man’s head snaps back, and he falls to the floor. We move
in with the prod.

Upon the failure of the Oil War and the defeat of the government that
pursued it, a reaction took place, including war crimes investigations that
led to Steele’s imprisonment from 2020 to 2025. Fiona gives us a glimpse
of Steele’s sensorium in his third year in maximum-security prison:

We’re hungry. Above us the air rattles from the ventilator. On the table
before us in our jail cell is a notebook. We are writing our testament. It’s
a distillation of everything we know to be absolutely true about the hu-
man race and its future. There are things we know in our DNA that
cannot be understood by strict rationality, though reason is a powerful
tool and can help us to communicate these truths to those who do not,
because of incapacity or lack of experience, grasp them instinctively.

The blogs back when we were fourteen were just practice. Here,
thanks to the isolation, we are able to go deep, to find the roots of hu-
man truth and put them down in words.

We examine the last sentence we have written: “It is the hero’s fate to
be misunderstood.”

A guard comes by and raps the bars of our cell. “Still working on the
great opus, Andy?”

We ignore him, close the manuscript, move from the table, and be-
gin to do push-ups in the narrow space beside the cot.

The guard raps again on the bars. “How about an answer, killer?”
His voice is testy.

We concentrate on doing the push-ups correctly. Eleven. Twelve.
Thirteen. Fourteen . . .

When we get out of here, all this work will make a difference.

This was indeed the case, Fiona shows us, but not in the way that
Steele intended. As a work of philosophy his testament was rejected by
all publishers. He struggled to make a living in the Long Emergency that
was the result of the oil decline and the global warming-spawned envi-
ronmental disasters that hit with full force in the 2020s. These changes
were asymmetric, but though some regions felt them more than others,
none were unaffected. The flipping of the Atlantic current turned 2022

Asimov's

into the first Year Without a Summer in Europe. Torrential rains in
North Africa, the desertification of the North American Great Plains,
mass wildlife migrations, drastic drops in grains production, die-offs of
marine life and decimated global fish stocks were among only the most
obvious problems with which worldwide civilization struggled. And An-
drew Steele was out of prison, without a connection in the world.

ARTIST

“The great artist is a rapist. It is his job to plant a seed, an idea or an
emotion, in the viewer’s mind. He uses every tool available to enforce his
will. The audience doesn’t know what it wants, but he knows what it
wants, and needs, and he gives it to them.

“To the degree I am capable of it, I strive to be a great artist.”

— Andrew Steele, 2037
“Man of Steele”
Interview on VarietyNet

^Vt this moment of distress, Steele saw an opportunity, and turned his
political testament into a best-selling novel, What’s Wrong With Heroes ?
A film deal followed immediately. Steele insisted on being allowed to
write the screenplay, and against its better judgment, the studio relent-
ed. Upon its release, What’s Wrong With Heroes 2 became the highest
grossing film in the history of cinema. In the character of Roark McMas-
ter, Steele created a virile philosopher king who spoke to the desperate
hopes of millions. With the money he made, Steele conquered the enter-
tainment world. A series of blockbuster films, television series, and virtu-
al adventures followed. This photo link shows him on the set of The Be-
trayal, his historical epic of the late twentieth century. The series,
conflating the Vietnam with two Iraq wars, presents the fiascos of the
early twenty-first as the result of Machiavellian subversives and their
bad-faith followers taking advantage of the innocence of the American
populace, undermining what was once a strong and pure-minded nation.
Fiona gives us a key scene from the series:

INT. AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 11

Two of the hijackers, wearing green camo, are gathered around a
large man seated in the otherwise empty first class cabin of the 757.
The big man, unshaven, wears a shabby Detroit Tigers baseball cap.

WALEED

(frantic)

What shall we do now?

MOORE

Keep the passengers back in coach. Is
Mohammad on course? How long?

February 2008

ABDULAZIZ
(calling back from cockpit)

Allah willing — three min utes.

Moore glances out the plane window.

MOORE’S P.O.V. — through window, an aerial view of Manhattan
on a beautiful clear day.

CLOSE ON MOORE

Smirks.

MOORE
Time to go.

Moore hefts his bulk from the first class seat, moves toward the on-
board baggage closet near the front of the plane.

ABDULAZIZ
What are you doing?

From out of a hanging suit bag, Moore pulls a parachute, and straps
it on.

WALEED

Is this part of the plan?

Moore jerks up the lever on the plane’s exterior door and yanks on
it. It does not budge.

MOORE

Don’t just stand there, Waleed! Help me!

Waleed moves to help Moore, and reluctantly, Abdulaziz joins them.

ATTA

(from cockpit)

There it is! Allah akbar!

Moore and the other two hijackers break the seal and the door flies
open. A blast of wind sucks Abdulaziz and Waleed forward; they fall
back onto the plane’s deck. Moore braces himself against the edge of
the door with his hands.

MOORE

In the name of the Democratic Party, the
compassionate, the merciful — so long, boys!

Moore leaps out of the plane.

John Kessel

Asimov's

The Betrayal was the highest rated series ever to run on American televi-
sion, and cemented Steele’s position as the most bankable mass-appeal Hol-
lywood producer since Spielberg. At the age of thirty-eight, Steele married
the actress Esme Napoli, leading lady in three of his most popular films.

RELIGIOUS LEADER

r he next section of Fiona’s biography begins with this heartrending ex-
perience from Steele’s middle years:

We are in a sumptuous hotel suite with a blonde, not wearing much
of anything. We are chasing her around the bed.

“ You can’t catch me!”

We snag her around the waist, and pull her onto the bed. “ I’ve al-
ready caught you. You belong to me.” We hold up her ring finger, with
its platinum band. “ You see?”

“I’m full of nanomachines, ” she says breathlessly. “If you catch me
you’ll catch them.”

The Scarlet Plague has broken out in Los Angeles, after raging for a
month in Brazil. We have fled the city with Esme and are holed up in
this remote hotel in Mexico.

“When are we going to have these children?” we ask her. “We need
children. Six at least.”

“You’re going to have to work harder than this to deserve six chil-
dren,” Esme says. “The world is a mess. Do we want to bring children
into it?”

“The world has always been a mess. We need to bring children into
it because it’s a mess.” We kiss her perfect cheek.

But a minute later, as we make love, we spot the growing rash along
the inside ofEsme’s thigh.

The death of Steele’s wife came near the beginning of the plague
decade, followed by the Sudden War and the Collapse. Fiona cites the best
estimates of historiographers that, between 2040 and 2062, the human
population of the earth went from 8.2 to somewhat less than two billion.
The toll was slightly higher in the less developed nations; on the other
hand, resistance to the plagues was higher among humans of the tropical
regions. This situation in the middle years of the century transformed the
Long Emergency of 2020 to 2040 — a condition in which civilization, al-
though stressed, might still be said to function, and with which Steele
and his generation had coped — into the Die Off, in which the only aspect
of civilization that, even in the least affected regions, might be said to
function was a desperate triage.

One of the results of the Long Emergency had been to spark wide-
spread religious fervor. Social and political disruptions had left millions
searching for certitudes. Longevity breakthroughs, new medicine, genetic
engineering, cyborging, and AI pushed in one direction, while widespread

The Last American

February 2008

climactic change, fights against deteriorating civil and environmental
conditions, and economic disruptions pushed in another. The young
warred against the old, the rich against the poor. Reactionary religious
movements raged on four continents. Interpreting the chaos of the twen-
ty-first century in terms of eschatology was a winning business. Terror-
ism in the attempt to bring on utopia or the end of the world was a com-
mon reality. Steele, despite his grief, rapidly grasped that art, even
popular art, had no role in this world. So he turned, readily, to religion.

* Human evolution is a process of moral evolution. The thing that
makes us different from animals is our understanding of the ethical im-
plications of every action that we perform: those that we must perform,
those that we choose. Some actions are matters of contingency, and some
are matters of free will.

“Evolution means we will eventually come to fill the universe. To have
our seed spread far and wide. That is what we are here for. To engender
those children, to bear them, to raise them properly, to have them extend
their — and our — thought, creativity, joy, understanding, to every particle
of the visible universe.”

— Andrew Steele, 2052
Sermon in the Cascades

Steele’s Church of Humanity grew rapidly in the 2040s; while the pop-
ulation died and cities burned, its membership more than doubled every
year, reaching several million by 2050. Steele’s credo of the Hero trans-
ferred easily to religious terms; his brilliantly orchestrated ceremonies
sparked ecstatic responses; he fed the poor and comforted the afflicted,
and using every rhetorical device at his command, persuaded his follow-
ers that the current troubles were the birth of a new utopian age, that
every loss had its compensation, that sacrifice was noble, that reward was
coming, that from their loins would spring a new and better race, des-
tined to conquer the stars. Love was the answer.

His creed crossed every ethnic, racial, sexual, gender preference, class,
and age barrier. Everyone was human, and all equal.

The Church of Humanity was undeniably successful in helping mil-
lions of people, not just in the United States but across the bleeding globe,
deal with the horrors of the Die Off. It helped them to rally in the face of
unimaginable psychological and material losses. But it was not the only
foundation for the recovery. By the time some semblance of order was re-
stored to world affairs in the 2060s, genetically modified humans, the su-
perbrights, were attempting to figure a way out of the numerous dead
ends of capitalism, antiquated belief systems, and a dysfunctional system
of nation states. This was a period of unexampled experimentation, and
the blossoming of many technologies that had been only potentialities
prior to the collapse, among them the uploading of human identities, neu-
rological breakthroughs on the origins of altruism and violence, grafted
information capacities, and free quantum energy.

Most of these developments presented challenges to religion. Steele

John Kessel

Asimov's

came to see such changes as a threat to fundamental humanity. So began
his monstrous political career.

POLITICIAN

“The greatest joy in life is putting yourself in the circumstance of anoth-
er person. To see the world through his eyes, to feel the air on her skin, to
breathe in deeply the spirit of their souls. To have his joy and trouble be
equally real to you. To know that others are fully and completely human,
just as you are. To get outside of your own subjectivity, and to see the world
from a completely different and equally valid perspective, to come fully to
understand them. When that point of understanding is reached, there is
no other word for the feeling that you have than love. Just as much as you
love yourself, as you love your children, you love this other.

“And at that point, you must exterminate them.”

— Andrew Steele, 2071
What I Believe

ZUteele was swept into office as President of the reconstituted United
States in the election of 2064, with his Humanity Party in complete con-
trol of the Congress. In his first hundred days, Steele signed a raft of leg-
islation comprising his Humanity Initiative. Included were the Repopu-
lation Act that forced all women of childbearing age to have no fewer than
four children, a bold space colonization program, restrictions on genetic
alterations and technological body modifications, the wiping clean of all
uploaded personalities from private and public databases, the Turing
Limit on AI, the Neurological Protection Act of 2065, and the establish-
ment of a legal “standard human being.”

In Steele’s first term, “non-standard” humans were allowed to maintain
their civil rights, but were identified by injected markers, their move-
ments and employment restricted by the newly established Humanity
Agency. Through diplomacy efforts and the international efforts of the
Church of Humanity, similar policies were adapted, with notable areas of
resistance, throughout much of the world.

In Steele’s second term, the HA was given police powers and the non-
standard gradually stripped of civil and property rights. By his third term,
those who had not managed to escape the country lost all legal rights and
were confined to posthuman reservations, popularly known as “Freak
Towns.” The establishment of the Protectorate over all of North and South
America stiffened resistance elsewhere, and resulted in the uneasy Global
Standoff. Eventually, inevitably, came the First and Second Human Wars.

Fiona includes a never-before-experienced moment from the twenty-
third year of Steele’s presidency.

We are in a command bunker, a large, splendidly appointed room
one whole wall of which is a breathtaking view of the Grand Tetons.

The Last American

February 2008

We sit at a table with our closest advisors, listening to General Jinjur
describe their latest defeat by the New Humans. There are tears in her
eyes as she recounts the loss of the Fifth Army in the assault on Madrid.

We do not speak. Our cat, Socrates, sits on our lap, and we scratch
him behind his ears. He purrs.

“How many dead?” Chief of Command Taggart asks.

“Very few, sir” reports Jinjur. “But over 90 percent converted. It’s
their new amygdalic bomb. It destroys our troops’ will to fight. The
soldiers just lay down their arms and, go off looking for something to
eat. You try organizing an autistic army.”

“At least they’re good at math,” says Secretary Bloom.

“How can these posthumans persist ?” Dexter asks. “We’ve extermi-
nated millions. How many of them are left?”

“We can’t know, sir. They keep making more.”

“But they don’t even fight,” says Taggart. “They must be on the point
of extinction.”

“It has never been about fighting, sir.”

“It’s this damned subversion,” says Taggart. “We have traitors
among us. They seed genetic changes among the people. They turn our
own against us. How can we combat that?”

General Jinjur gathers herself. She is quite a striking woman, the
flower of the humanity we have fought to preserve for so many years. “If
I may be permitted to say so, we are fighting ourselves. We are trying to
conquer our own human elan. Do you want to live longer? Anyone who
wants to live longer will eventually become posthuman. Do you want to
understand the universe? Anyone who wants to understand the uni-
verse will eventually become posthuman. Do you want peace of mind?
Anyone who wants peace of mind will eventually become posthuman.”

Something in her tone catches us, and we are finally moved to
speak. “ You are one of them, aren’t you.”

“Yes,” she says.

The contemporary citizen need not be troubled with, and Fiona does
not provide, any detailed recounting of the war’s progress, or how it end-
ed in the Peace that Passeth All Understanding of 2096. The treatment of
the remaining humans, the choices offered them, the removal of those few
persisting to Mars, and their continued existence there under quarantine,
are all the material for another work.

Similarly, the circumstances surrounding Steele’s death — the cross, the
taser, the Shetland pony — so much a subject of debate, speculation, and
conspiracy theory, surely do not need rehearsing here. We know what
happened to him. He destroyed himself.

AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS

“The highest impulse of which a human being is capable is to sacrifice
himself in the service of the community of which he is a part, even when

John Kessel

Asimov's

him for that sacrifice. In fact, such scorn is more often than not to be ex-
pected. The true savior of his fellows is not deterred by the prospect of re-
jection, though carrying the burden of his unappreciated gift is a trial
that he can never, but for a few moments, escape. It is the hero’s fate to be
misunderstood.”

What’s Wrong with Heroes? (unpublished version)

Fiona 13 ends her biography with a simple accounting of the number of
beings, human and posthuman, who died as a result of Steele’s life. She
speculates that many of these same beings might not have lived had he
not lived as well, and comes to no formal conclusion, utilitarian or other-
wise, as to the moral consequences of the life of Dwight Andrew Steele.

Certainly few tears are shed for Steele, and few for the ultimate decline
of the human race. I marvel at that remnant of humans who, using tech-
nologies that he abhorred, have incorporated into their minds a slice of
Steele’s personality in the attempt to make themselves into the image of
the man they see as their savior. Indeed, I must confess to more than a
passing interest in their poignant delusions, their comic, mystifying pas-
times, their habitual conflicts, their simple loves and hates, their inabili-
ty to control themselves, their sudden and tragic enthusiasms.

Bootlegged Steele personalities circulate in the Cognosphere, and it
may be that those of you who, like me, on occasion edit their capacities in
order to spend recreational time being human, will avail themselves of
this no doubt unique and terrifying experience. O

Trends for the 21st Century

(thus far)

101

I '//A Qloom HI Doom

The Last American

EALAXY

BLUES

CONCLUSION

THE GREAT
BEYOND

Allen M. Steele

Now that he's finished two spin-off novels set in the
same universe (i.e.. Spindrift and Galaxy Blues), Allen
Steele tells us he's hard at work on Coyote Horizon ,
which will continue the storyline established in the
original trilogy. Allen blames his frequent returns to
Coyote on his readers. "They have demanded that I
keep writing these books, and I’m all too happy to

comply^'

Synopsis of Parts One through Three:

My name is Jules Truffaut, and this is the story of how I redeemed the
human race.

It all began when I stowed away aboard the starship Robert E. Lee for
its monthly voyage to Coyote, humankind’s first interstellar colony. Tech-
nically speaking, I was a first-class passenger, having already booked pas-
sage to 47 Ursae Majoris. However, as a former ensign in the Union Astro-
nautica of the Western Hemisphere — whose relationship with Coyote is
strained at best — it was necessary for me to sneak aboard the ship just be-
fore it departed from Earth.

My plan was to travel to Coyote under an assumed identity; once there, I
would plead for political asylum. But my scheme backfired when a steward

Asimov's

who’d found me became suspicious. Checking the manifest, she discovered
that, although I had indeed purchased a ticket, there was no record of me
actually boarding the ship. So shortly after the Lee jumped through
Earth’s starbridge to 47 Ursae Majoris, the chief petty officer placed me
under arrest.

On the bridge, I met the Lee’s commanding officer, Anastasia Tereshko-
va. Realizing that I was in serious trouble, I revealed my true identity and
informed her that I was seeking amnesty. However, I’d overlooked the fact
that one has to actually set foot on foreign soil in order to defect. Since the
Lee was still in space, Tereshkova was obliged to take me back to Earth
and turn me over to the authorities.

So I took matters into my own hands. On my way to the brig, I escaped
from my captors and stole one of the ship’s lifeboats. I was trained as a pi-
lot, so I was able to guide the craft to a safe touchdown on Coyote. Howev-
er, almost as soon as I landed, I was apprehended by the colonial militia.

The soldiers brought me to Liberty, Coyote’s largest colony, where I was
thrown in jail. I had little doubt that the local magistrates would order my
deportation. Before that happened, though, I had two visitors. The first
was a mysterious figure who appeared at my cell window. As he stared at
me, a door opened in my mind, releasing all my memories. I fell uncon-
scious; when I awoke, the stranger had disappeared.

The second was Morgan Goldstein, the billionaire founder of Janus,
Ltd., an interstellar shipping company. Impressed by the way I’d escaped
from the Lee, he offered a way out of my predicament. Goldstein was re-
cruiting a crew for an expedition to Rho Coronae Borealis, with the intent
of opening trade with its inhabitants, the alien hjadd If I signed on as
shuttle pilot, he would make sure that I wasn’t deported. Having little
choice, I agreed to work for him.

After arranging for my release, Goldstein took me to a tavern where I
met the rest of the crew: the captain, Ted Harker, and his wife and first offi-
cer, Emily Collins, both of whom were on the first ship to contact the hjadd;
the helmsman, Ali Youssef; and the cargo master, a lovely young woman by
the name of Rain Thompson, who was oddly cold toward me. And finally,
another passenger besides Goldstein himself: Gordon Ash, whom I recog-
nized as the stranger who’d visited me in jail.

Our ship, the Pride of Cucamonga, hadn’t arrived from Earth yet, so we
cooled our heels in Liberty for a few days. That gave me time to get interest-
ed in Rain. She didn’t want anything to do with me, though, and it wasn’t
until I had breakfast with her that I found out what the problem was.
Somehow, she had learned the reason why Td been thrown out of the Union
Astronautica — I was caught helping my younger brother Jim cheat on his
academy exams — and, believing that I’d betrayed him, thought I couldn’t
be trusted. I was telling her my side of the story when Ted showed up. Our
ship had come in, and it was time for us to leave.

When we arrived at the spaceport to board our shuttle, the Loose Lucy, a
couple of surprises awaited us. The first was our cargo: two and a half tons
of marijuana, which the hjadd apparently regarded as a delicacy. The sec-
ond was that we had another passenger: Mahamatasja Jas Sa-Fhadda —
Jas for short, the hjadd Prime Emissary. When I committed a faux pas

Galaxy Blues — Conclusion: The Great Beyond

February 2008

during my introduction to himher, Ash stepped in to quietly correct me.
Clearly there was more to him than met the eye.

The Pride of Cucamonga turned out to be an old freighter, but its chief en-
gineer, Doc Schachner, assured us that it was fit to fly. While loading the
cargo, Rain and I had an argument which nearly cost me my job; to give me
a chance to cool off, Ted had me take a jug of com liquor to Ash’s quarters. I’d
already figured out that Ash was an alcoholic, but while visiting him, I
discovered something else: he was capable of reading people’s minds.

The next day, the Pride launched from Coyote orbit. While en route to the
starbridge — which could only be opened to Rho Coronae Borealis by a coded
key Jas carried — the Prime Emissary invited Rain and me to his quarters.
While waiting for himher to let us in, Rain offered an apology for her rude be-
havior, which I accepted. But she wasn’t the only person to surprise me: once
we were alone with Jas, heshe asked what we knew about something called
the Order of the Eye. I professed ignorance, but after we left hisher cabin,
Rain informed me that the Order was a secret cult of telepaths rumored to
be funded by Goldstein. This explained why Morgan had invited Ash along:
he wanted someone who might be able to tell him what Jas was thinking.

Then Pride made the jump to Hjarr, where we rendezvoused with an
enormous space colony, the Talus qua’spah, in orbit above the planet. As
circumstances would have it, Rain and I were the first people to leave the
ship. Upon entering what appeared to be an interspecies reception area, we
were informed that the two of us needed to undergo decontamination.
There was an awkward moment when we had to get naked in front of each
other; once we got past that, though, we proceeded to living quarters spe-
cially designed for human visitors, where we were soon joined by the rest of
the crew.

Cargo unloading went as planned, but not the trade negotiations. Gold-
stein found that, in exchange for the cannabis we’d brought with us, all the
hjadd were willing to give us were two thousand artifacts little more use-
ful than as paperweights. Nor was Ash much help; since the hjadd didn’t
actually think in our language, his ability to read their minds was useless.
Frustrated by his failure to gain the advanced technology he desired,
Goldstein took it out on us. I was informed that my job would be terminat-
ed as soon as the ship returned to Coyote, with my amnesty arrangement
rendered null and void.

Before the Pride left Talus qua’spah, though, we were obliged to attend a
reception being thrown in our honor. Just prior to this, the hjadd sent food
to our quarters. Ted warned us against sampling the native cuisine, but I
was hungry enough to try something that tasted like spice cakes. Little did
I know that they’d been made with some of the cannabis we’d brought with
us. So I was quite stoned when we arrived at the reception; in my looped
state of mind, I inadvertently insulted the chaaz’braan, the supreme reli-
gious leader for most of the civilized galaxy.

The hjadd were not amused, and it appeared that relations between hu-
mankind and the rest of the galaxy had come to a premature end. Howev-
er, the High Council offered us a chance to make amends: take the Pride
via starbridge to a distant solar system, where we were to place a probe di-
rectly in the path o/'Kasimasta, an enormous rogue black hole that had al-

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Asimov's

ready destroyed several inhabited worlds and was about to annihilate yet
another.

Unwilling to put his ship in jeopardy, Ted refused to do this. But the
hjadd weren’t taking no for an answer. When the Pride jumped away from
Rho Coronae Borealis, we found ourselves not back in the 47 Ursae Ma-
joris system, but instead above a so-called “ hot Jupiter” in close orbit
around 51 Pegasi. Jas had reprogrammed the navigation computer to
bring us there, and told Ted that heshe would not release the proper coor-
dinates unless we agreed to undertake the mission that we’d been given.
Our choice was plain: face Kasimasta, or be roasted alive.

So off we went, to HD 70642 and a rendezvous with the most terrifying
force in the galaxy.

SIXTEEN

Firemen in a burning house . . . who bells the cat? . . . the trouble with

women . . . words for the blues.

We came through the starbridge at HD 70642 to find ourselves in a
traffic jam.

That’s the only way to describe what I saw through the portholes. Emi-
ly had raised the shutters just before the Pride made the jump from 51
Pegasi, and it’s fortunate that she’d taken that precaution — otherwise we
might have struck the nearest starship waiting to enter the ring. As it
was, the first thing we heard upon coming out of hyperspace was the shriek
of the collision alarm, followed by a string of Arabic blasphemies from Ali
as he hastened to switch off the autopilot and take control of the helm.

Jas hadn’t been kidding when heshe told us that the nord were evacu-
ating their home world. All around us, as far as the eye could see, was a
vast swarm of what appeared to be titanic jellyfish, their umbrella-like
membranes several miles in diameter. It wasn’t until the Pride passed
the one with which we’d nearly collided that we saw its translucent hood
was, in fact, a solar sail. Tethered behind it was a streamlined cylinder a
little smaller than our own ship, its hull ringed with dozens of portholes.

A high-pitched voice like that of an irate turkey gobbled at us from the
speakers, its language indecipherable but the meaning nonetheless obvi-
ous: watch where you’re going, jackass! Jas patched into the comlink and
responded in hisher own tongue. Apparently the nord captain had his
own translator, because after a brief bit of back-and-forth between them,
the com went silent.

It’s been said that a fireman is someone crazy enough to run into a
burning house while everyone else is running out. That’s what I felt like
just then. As the Pride slowly glided between the scores of nord vessels
waiting their turn to collapse their sails and enter the starbridge, I saw a
civilization in full rout. Several hundred thousand miles away, Nordash

Galaxy Blues — Conclusion: The Great Beyond

February 2008

was a blue-green marble that bore an unsettling similarity to Earth; it
was all too easy to imagine multitudes of nord — whatever they looked
like — clamoring to board the shuttles that would ferry them to starships
in orbit above their doomed world. How many of their kind would be left
behind, though, and where the survivors intended to go, we did not know.
Nonetheless, we were witnessing an interstellar diaspora.

No one said much of anything as the Pride carefully picked its way
through the evacuation fleet. Save for a few subdued words between Ted
and Ah, a dark silence fell over the command center, and it wasn’t until
our ship had eased past the outermost ships of the nord armada that any-
one was able to breathe easy again. But we were far from safe. The nord
were leaving . . . and we’d just arrived. Like firemen in a burning house.

Ted instructed Ali to get a fix on Aerik and start plotting a trajectory,
then he unfastened his harness and pushed himself out of his seat.
“Right, then,” he said quietly, grabbing hold of the ceiling rail. “Everyone
who doesn’t have business here just now is relieved ... at least for the
time being. Take a nap, get a bite to eat, whatever. We’ll call you back
when we need you.”

Good idea. I got up from my seat, arched iy back to get rid of the kinks,
then looked over at Rain. She didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave the
bridge; there was a pensive look on her face as she gazed out the nearest
window. I hesitated, then decided to let her be. All I wanted to do was fol-
low Ted’s advice: change out of my sweaty clothes, grab a sandwich, and
maybe catch a few winks in my hammock.

As I floated over toward the manhole, Ash rose to join me. Morgan didn’t
pay any attention to him — indeed, it seemed as if Goldstein was deliber-
ately ignoring him — and Jas remained strapped into hisher couch. Ash
didn’t say anything as we entered the access shaft, but as soon as we
were alone, he took hold of my arm.

“Keep an eye on Youssef ,” he whispered. Before I could ask why, he beat
me to it. “I caught something from him just before we went into hyper-
space. The only reason Jas is still alive is because Ali knows we still need
himher.”

“Yeah, well ...” I was too tired to deal with it just then. “I figured that
already. But Ah’s not dumb enough to . . .”

“All I’m saying is, keep an eye on him. Okay?” Ash let go of my arm and
pushed past me. “We have enough problems as is.”

I went down to my cabin and put on some fresh clothes, then floated
down the corridor to the wardroom. I was making a peanut butter and jel-
ly sandwich when three bells rang, giving me just enough time to stow
everything away and plant my toes within a foot restraint before main
engine ignition. I could tell from the way the ship trembled that it was no
maneuvering bum; the Pride was slowly building up thrust, and it wouldn’t
be long before its acceleration reached one gee. The captain wasn’t sparing
the horsies. At least we’d be able to move around the ship without having
to use hand rails.

Just about the time I was finishing lunch, Ted’s voice came over my

Allen M. Steele

Asimov's

headset, asking if I’d return to the bridge. So much for my nap. When I
got to the command deck, I found that everyone had left except for him,
Doc, and Ali. Ted’s face was grim as he waved me toward Emily’s seat.

“We’ve set course for Aerik,” he began, “and Ali and I have come up with
a tentative mission profile. Sorry to bother you, but we thought that you
needed to be in on this stage of the planning.”

“Sure. No problem.” I gazed at the holo tank. A model of the local sys-
tem was suspended above the console, with the orbits of Nordash and
Aerik depicted as elliptical circles surrounding HD 70642. A curved red
line was traced between the two planets. “Is that our course?”

“Uh-huh.” Ted entered a command in his keyboard that overlaid a
three-dimensional graph upon the holo. “We’re pretty lucky, actually.
They’re presently in conjunction, with both at perihelion on the same side
of the sun. So instead of being three a.u.’s apart, their average distance at
almost any other time, instead they’re only about one and a half a.u.’s away
from each other . . . approximately two and a quarter million kilometers.”

I nodded. The Nordash system wasn’t nearly as large as Earth’s, which
was fortunate for us. The nord would’ve disagreed, of course. Just then,
they would have preferred that their world was at aphelion on the far
side of the sun ... or, in fact, anywhere Kasimasta wasn’t.

“Anyway” Ted continued, “this means we should be able to reach Aerik
before Kasimasta does . . . provided, of course, that we don’t do any sight-
seeing along the way. I’ve given the order to run the main engine at its
rated capacity, two hundred and fifty thousand impulses-per-second.
Once we reach cruise velocity, we’ll be doing about twenty-five hundred
kilometers per second.”

My heart skipped a beat. Maybe it wasn’t fight-speed, but it was a siz-
able fraction nonetheless. “Good grief, skipper ... do we have enough fuel
for that?”

Ted glanced over at Doc. “The Pride has sufficient reserves for four and a
quarter a.u.’s,” he said, “enough to get from Earth to Jupiter and back
again. We barely put a dent in that on the way to Hjarr, thanks to the star-
bridges, and the hjadd were kind enough to top off our tank before we left.”

“Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but—” Ted grimaced “ — well, we
now know that they didn’t exactly do this out of the kindness of their
hearts. From what Jas told us, the Talus High Council never intended to
take no for an answer.”

“Of course,” Doc continued, “we may need a tow by the time we return
to Talus qua’spah, and I can tell you right now that Mr. Goldstein is going
to have to pay for a major overhaul . . . but, yeah, I think we’ll make it.”

“At any rate,” Ted went on, “this means that our ETA will be approxi-
mately thirty hours from now. That should give you enough time to pre-
pare for your part of the mis sion.” He hesitated. “And here’s where things
become a bit dicey.”

He magnified the image within the holo tank so that Aerik and its
satellites increased in size. “There’s Kha-Zann,” he said, pointing to a
large moon at the periphery of the system. “Approximately the same
mass and diameter as Europa, with much the same surface gravity. Car-
bon dioxide atmosphere, but not very dense . . . about a hundred and fifty

Galaxy Blues — Conclusion: The Great Beyond

February 2008

millibars at the equator . . . but enough to give you some measure of pro-
tection.”

“Protection?” Although I’d had experience with landing on atmospheric
planets, I would have preferred to set down on an airless moon. “Against
what?”

Ted took a deep breath. “By the time you get there, Kasimasta will only
be about eight hundred thousand kilometers away . . .”

“Oh, hell!”

“I told you this was the dicey part.” A humorless smile played across his
face. “At least the atmosphere will provide you with some radiation pro-
tection while you’re down there. And Kasimasta will be coming in hot . . .
mainly X-rays from its accretion disc. So the less time you spend on the
surface, the better. In fact, I’d recommend landing close to the daylight
terminator, if at all possible.”

“Uh-huh. And how long will I have to. . . ?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First things first.” Ted pointed to the
red thread of the Pride 1 s trajectory. “Here’s the game plan. Once we’re on
primary approach to Aerik and the Pride has initiated its braking ma-
neuver, you’ll take Lucy away. Our trajectory will bring us within a hun-
dred and thirty thousand kilometers of Kha-Zann, so you shouldn’t have
to consume much fuel getting there.”

The holo image zoomed in again, this time to display Loose Lucy’s de-
parture from the Pride and its rendezvous with Kha-Zann. “In the mean-
time,” Ted went on, “the Pride will continue toward Aerik and swing
around it, initiating a periapsis bum at closest approach to the far side of
the planet. That’ll put us on a return heading that’ll bring us back toward
Kha-Zann, where we’ll pick you up.”

“Why not go into orbit around Kha-Zann itself?”

“We thought of that,” AH said, “but when we ran a simulation, we dis-
covered that it would take too much time to establish orbit around Kha-
Zann. Not only that, but once we broke orbit, we’d have to build up enough
thrust again to achieve escape velocity, and by then Kasimasta would
catch up with us. This way, we use a slingshot maneuver around Aerik to
keep from shedding too much velocity. Once we fire the main engine, we
blow out of there before Kasimasta reaches Kha-Zann.”

“If all goes well, that is,” Ted added.

I didn’t like the sound of that. “What could go wrong?”

“Well . . .” Doc began, then shook his head. “All this means you’re going
to have a very tight window. No more than an hour on the surface . . . and
believe me, that’s stretching it.”

I stared at him. “An hour? You’ve got to be . . .”

“No, he’s not.” Ted’s face was serious. “And neither am I. You land, you
drop off the probe, you take off again. If everything works according to
plan, you should be able to reach the rendezvous point just in time to
dock with the Pride as we swing by again. Otherwise . . .”

His voice trailed off. Not that he had to spell it out. If I failed to reach
the Pride, then the captain would have no choice but to leave me behind.
By then, the ship would be racing just ahead of the Annihilator, with no
time left to make orbit around Kha-Zann and wait for me to show up.

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Asimov's

“Yeah. Got it.” I let out my breath. “So Fm the poor mouse who gets to
put the bell around the cat’s neck.”

“Mouse? Cat?” Ali’s expression was quizzical. “What are you talking
about?”

“Old fable, courtesy of Aesop,” I said, and Ah shook his head. Chalk it
up to cultural differences. “Never mind. Just do me a favor and download
everything into Lucy's comp. I’ll run a simulation from the cockpit, make
sure that everything . . .”

“Just one more thing.” Ted looked at the others, then back at me again.
“You’re not going to be able to do this alone. Someone will have to help
you unload the probe and place it on the surface, so you’re going to have
to take another person with you.”

That hadn’t occurred to me, but now that he mentioned it, I knew he
was right. Fd have to use the cargo elevator to remove the probe from
Lucy's hold and put it on the ground. I could conceivably do it by myself,
but not within the short amount of time Fd have on Kha-Zann. Like it or
not, someone else would have to ride down with me.

“Yeah, okay.” I glanced at Doc. “You up for this, chief? I know it’s a lot to
ask, but . . .”

“Sorry. Not me.” Doc shook his head. “I’ve got to stay aboard, try to keep
the ship from rattling apart at the seams.”

“And don’t ask for Emily, either,” Ted said. “I know she’s qualified, but
there’s no way Fm putting my wife at risk.” He hesitated. “Besides, we al-
ready have someone . . . Rain.”

A chill ran down my back. “Skipper . . . Ted . . . please don’t do this. I
can’t . . .”

All of a sudden, I found myself unable to finish what I wanted to say —
I can't put her life in jeopardy any more than you can put Emily’s — be-
cause that would’ve meant admitting more than I was willing to these
men, or perhaps even to myself.

So I played stubborn instead. “Look, I can take care of this on my own.
No reason to get her involved.”

Ted frowned. “Are you telling me you’re still not able to work with her?”

That looked like an easy way out. “Yeah, that’s what Fm saying. Cap,
you don’t know what a pain in the ass she . . .”

“Well, that’s just too bad . . . because she’s already volunteered .” A sly
smile; Ted didn’t have to be a telepath to know a lie when he heard it.
“And here I thought the two of you were getting along so well.”

“Nice try, though,” Doc murmured.

My face grew warm, but before I could respond, Ted nodded toward the
manhole. “Right, then . . . unless you have any more questions, you’ve got
a lot of work ahead of you. All of us do.”

There was nothing left to be discussed, so I headed for the access shaft.
I waited until I shut the hatch behind me before, still clinging to the lad-
der, I threw my fist into the nearest bulkhead.

The rest of the day was spent preparing for the mission.

Before that, though, I tracked down Rain and gave her a piece of my

Galaxy Blues — Conclusion: The Great Beyond

February 2008

mind. Not that it got me anywhere. She was having lunch with Emily
when I found her in the wardroom; seeing the look on my face, the first
officer quietly excused herself and gave us the room, and once the door was
shut I blew up. I don’t remember most of what I said — I was just venting,
really — but Rain just sat there and took it, silently regarding me with
solemn eyes that I couldn’t quite bring myself to meet. And when I was
done, she polished off the rest of her coffee, stood up from the table, and qui-
etly suggested that we head down to the shuttle and check out the probe.

And that was it. We never had an argument because she refused to ar-
gue in the first place. Besides, she’d already received Ted’s blessing, so my
opinion didn’t really count. That’s the trouble with women: they’re
smarter than men, and therefore enjoy an unfair advantage. And the hell
of it is that they know it, too.

The hjadd probe was located in Lucy’s cargo hold, strapped to the deck
right where Jas said it would be. Hisher people had smuggled it aboard
inside a crate identical to those they’d used to pack the gnoshes; even if
I’d spotted it before we left Talus qua’spah, I probably would have as-
sumed it was a box that had somehow got misplaced.

Before I could open it, though, Rain stopped me. “Perhaps we should ask
Jas to do it for us; no telling what other tricks heshe had up hisher sleeve.”
So I got on the comlink and asked Ted to relay our request to the Prime
Emissary, and a little while later Jas came down from hisher quarters.

I noticed that heshe still wore hisher weapon around the left wrist of
hisher environment suit; apparently Jas wasn’t quite ready to trust any-
one aboard not to take revenge for hisher actions. Remembering what
Ash had said to me earlier, I couldn’t blame himher. Nonetheless, I didn’t
say anything about it. Rain saw the weapon, too, but kept her mouth
shut. Like I said, a smart girl.

Jas assured us that the crate wasn’t booby-trapped, and I opened it just
the way I had the others. Tucked inside was a compact sphere, about
three and a half feet in diameter, its burnished silver surface lined with
hexagonal panels. Arranged around its equator were rungs suitable for
either hjadd or human hands; recessed within the topmost panel were
three small studs, blue, red, and white. Once the probe was in place, Jas
told us, we were to press first the blue button, then the red, and finally
the white. That was it — the probe would do the rest.

“Of course,” I said, “you can come along with us and make sure that we
get it right. We’ve got lots of room for passengers.”

I was only half-joking when I said this, but apparently I struck a nerve,
for the faceplate of hisher helmet swung sharply toward me. “My suit is
not meant to be worn outside an atmospheric environment,” Jas replied,
as if that explained everything. “The probe is designed for simplicity of
operation. My assistance is not necessary.”

“How interesting.” Rain bent over the probe to study it closely. “Your
people build a device to study a black hole, but you made it so that it
could be operated by another race.” She looked up at himher. “Guess
you’re just lucky we happened to come along at the right time.”

Jas was silent for a moment. Hisher suit concealed the mannerisms I’d
learned to interpret — the attitude of hisher fin, whether or not hisher

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Asimov's

throat sacs were inflated — but nonetheless I had a sense that hisher ret-
icence stemmed from embarrassment. “My people always have others as-
sume risks on our behalf” heshe said at last. “It’s our way.”

“So that’s how we ...” I began, but before I could finish, Jas turned
away from us. Without another word, heshe left the hold, climbing back
up the ladder toward the top hatch.

“Coward,” I murmured, once he was gone.

“Don’t blame himher,” Rain said quietly. “Morgan told us about the
hjadd, remember? They’re not accustomed to taking chances.”

“Yeah, well . . . why is heshe aboard, then?”

“I have a feeling that being here isn’t hisher choice either.” She swatted
my arm. “C’mon. Back to work.”

We made sure that the cargo lift was operational, then returned to the
flight deck. I downloaded the mission program from the Pride and began
to put Lucy through a complete diagnostics check. Rain stayed for a little
while, but there wasn’t much she could do, so after a bit she returned to
the ship with the intent of outfitting our suits for surface work.

I remained in the shuttle for the next few hours, repeatedly running
simulations of our flight plan, tweaking the variables with each iteration
so that I’d have practice dealing with whatever problems we might en-
counter along the way. I was feeling a little more confident about the mis-
sion, but I still wasn’t satisfied that I’d considered everything that might
possibly go wrong. Still, I knew that if I didn’t get some rest, my reflexes
would be sluggish by the time I had to do this for real. So I put Lucy to
sleep and returned to the Pride.

The ship was quiet, save for the background rumble of the main engine,
and I figured that everyone had sacked out. I was still wide-awake,
though. Even as I opened the hatch leading to Deck Two, I realized that,
if I went back to my cabin, I’d probably just stare at the ceiling. I was
thinking about going up top to visit whoever was on watch — Doc, proba-
bly, or maybe Emily — when a familiar sound came to me: Ash’s guitar, its
melancholy chords gently reverberating off the corridor walls.

What the hell. Might as well see what the ol’ geek was up to. Before I
had a chance to knock at his door, Ash’s voice came to me from the other
side. “C’mon in, Jules. We’ve been waiting for you.”

We? Ash usually kept to himself. When I slid open the door, though, I
found that he wasn’t alone. Ash was sitting in his hammock, his guitar
cradled in his lap, and seated on the floor next to him was Rain.

She smiled up at me. “Don’t look so shocked. We figured you’d show up
sooner or later.” She patted the floor beside her. “Here. Sit.”

“And while you’re at it, have a drink.” Ash picked up a jug of bearshine
and offered it to me.

“Umm ... no thanks.” I shook my head as I squatted down next to Rain.
“Better not.”

“Oh, c’mon.” Rain took the jug from Ash. “We still have — ” a quick
glance at her watch “ — sixteen hours before we have to leave. Plenty of
time to get properly pissed and sober up again.”

With that, she pulled out the cork and, using both hands, tilted back
the jug. For a woman who’d once told me she didn’t drink, Rain certainly

Galaxy Blues — Conclusion: The Great Beyond

February 2008

knew how to swallow. A long gulp that seemed to last forever, then she
gasped. “Hot damn, that’s good.” She wiped her lips with the back of her
hand, then held out the jug. “Go ahead. Don’t be shy.”

The old pilot’s rule is twelve hours from bottle to throttle; I had that,
with a few hours to spare. So I accepted the jug from her and raised it to
my mouth. I’d never had com liquor before. It went down like molten
lava, burning my throat, and I nearly choked on it. But she was right; just
then, it tasted pretty damn good.

“There’s the man.” Ash grinned, then held out his hand. “Here, now. Time
to pay the piper.” Rain took the jug from me and passed it back to him. A
quick, thirsty slug, then he set it on the floor between the three of us. “All
right, then . . . piper’s been paid. Let’s see if he can entertain the rats.”

His hands returned to his guitar, but instead of the random progression
I’d heard before, this time his fingers produced a slow, boozy ramble, like
something that might come from a roadhouse band south of the Mason-
Dixon. “Been working on that song,” Ash added, glancing up at me from
his instrument. “Think I finally might have some words for it . . .”

Then he sang:

Ninety light-years from home,

Lord, you gotta pay your dues.

Ninety light-years from home,

I got nuthin’ to lose.

My spaceship’s a junker, and I’m out for a cruise,

I gotta bad ol’ case of the Galaxy Blues.

All right, so maybe it wasn’t Jelly Roll Morton. All the same, it gave me
a reason to smile for the first time in days. “I thought you said music
doesn’t need words,” I said, reaching for the bearshine again.

“Changed my mind,” Ash muttered, then he went on:

Stars all around me,

And I got nowhere to go.

Stars are all around me,

And light moves too slow.

I got planets in my pocket and black holes in my shoes,

It’s another phase of the Galaxy . . .

Wham! Something hit the door so hard that Rain and I both jumped an
inch. My first thought was that there had been some catastrophic accident,
such as the main fuel tank exploding, yet when it repeated a moment lat-
er — wham! wham! — I realized that someone was hammering at the door.

Ash was the only one who wasn’t perturbed. Although he stopped
singing, he continued to strum at his guitar. “Yes, Mr. Goldstein, you may
come in,” he said, as calm as calm could be.

The door slammed open, and there was Morgan, bleary-eyed and wear-
ing only his robe. “All right, you punks, that’s enough!” he snarled. “Some
of us are trying to sleep here, and you three are keeping us . . .”

“Mr. Goldstein . . . Morgan . . .” Ash sighed, still not looking up at him.
“If you don’t shut up and leave, I’m going to tell my friends how you
earned your first million dollars.” He paused, then added, “How you real-
ly earned your first million dollars.”

Morgan’s face went pale as all the bluster and fury of his entrance sud-

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denly dissipated. He started to open his mouth, but then Ash lifted his
eyes to gaze at him, and he abruptly seemed to reconsider whatever he was
going to say. The two men stared at each other for another moment . . . and
then, without so much as another word, Morgan stepped out of the cabin
and quietly pulled the door shut.

For a second or two, no one said anything. I finally looked at Ash. “YTtnow”
I murmured, “I want to be just like you when I grow up.”

Rain was similarly impressed. “How did you do that?” she whispered,
just as awestruck as I was.

Ash only shrugged as he went on playing his guitar. “If there’s one
thing that scares guys like Morgan, it’s having people find out the truth
about them.” A secretive smile. “And believe me, he’s got some pretty
nasty skeletons in his closet.”

I remembered the last time Ash had told Morgan to shut up, back on
Talus qua’spah. I’d thought then that it was some sort of psychic trick . . .
and perhaps it was, to the extent that the Order knew things about Mor-
gan that he’d rather not be made public. But the fact of the matter was,
all Ash had to do was verbally remind Morgan that he had the boss by the
short hairs.

“Oh, do tell.” Rain inched a little closer. “I’d love to know what . . .”

“Sorry. My order prohibits me from talking about things like that.” Ash
gave her a wink. “Not that Morgan knows this, of course. Now pass me
the jug, and 111 tell you about a sweet young girl from Nantucket ”

And it pretty much went downhill from there. In deference to anyone be-
sides Goldstein who might be trying to sleep, we tried to keep it down . . .
but nonetheless, as the jug made its way around the circle, the songs be-
came ruder, the jokes more coarse, as the three of us laughed and sang
our way long into the perpetual night.

The irony wasn’t lost on me that, only this morning, I’d sworn I’d never
drink again. Nor did I have any illusions about why we were doing what
we were doing. It was all too possible that, come tomorrow, we’d all die a
horrible death, consumed by a monster black hole. But there was little we
could do about that at the moment except celebrate what might be the
last hours of our lives.

Eventually, though, there came a point when the jug was empty. By
then, Ash’s voice was nothing more than a slur, his fingers clumsy upon
the strings. I was seeing double and Rain had collapsed against my shoul-
der; it was plain that none of us would be able to stay awake much longer.
Wincing against the dull throb in my head, I stumbled to my feet, pulling
Rain with me. Ash was falling asleep in his hammock as we found our
way to the door.

Half-carrying Rain, I hobbled down the corridor, heading for my cabin.
Rain woke up a little as I opened the door. “Uhh . . . hold it, this’s where I
get off” she muttered. “Gotta go thataway . . . my room.”

“Sure, sure.” Yet I was reluctant to let her go. Perhaps I was stinking
drunk, but nonetheless I was all too aware that there was a pretty girl
draped across my shoulders. “But, /know, /know ... I mean, /know. . . .”

That seemed to wake her up a little more. “Oh, no,” she said, gently piying
herself away from me. “Don’t you start. Not th’ . . . this’s not th’ time or th’ . . .”

Galaxy Blues — Conclusion: The Great Beyond

February 2008

“Place,” I finished, and that gave her the giggles. “Whatever, sure, but . . .”
I stopped and gazed at her. “If not now, then when . . . ?”

“‘Nuther time, maybe, but not . . .” She shook her head. This nearly
caused her to lose her balance, so she grabbed my arm to steady herself.
Somehow, my hands fell to her hips, and for a moment there was a look
in her eyes that seemed as if she was reconsidering my unspoken propo-
sition. But then she pushed herself away from me again.

“Definitely not now,” she finished.

Despite all the booze I’d put away, I was still sober enough to remem-
ber the definition of the word no. “Yeah, s’okay. . . ”

Rain leaned forward and, raising herself on tip-toes, gave me a kiss.
Her mouth was soft and warm, and tasted of bearshine. “Get us through
this,” she whispered, “and maybe well see about it.”

And then she wheeled away from me. I watched her go, realizing that
I’d just been given another reason to live.

SEVENTEEN

Eye of the monster ... a fine time .
root hog or die.

nice place to visit, but et cetera .

F IV

ourteen hours later, Rain and I were on our way to Kha-Zann.

By then, I’d sobered up enough to climb into Lucy's cockpit. Knowing
that he’d have a drunk aboard his ship, Ted had made sure that the med
bay was stocked with plenty of morning-after pills, eye drops, and antiox-
idant patches; finally I knew why Ash had been able to recover from his
binges so quickly. Two each of the former and one of the latter, along with
hot coffee and a cold sponge bath, and I was ready to fly.

Rain met me in the ready room. She didn’t mention the inebriated pass
I’d made at her the night before, but I couldn’t help noticing the way she
blushed when I suggested that we save time by suiting up together. She
declined with the polite excuse that she wanted to double-check her gear
before putting it on. I didn’t argue, but instead suited up by myself. I wor-
ried that I might have damaged our friendship, but there were more im-
portant matters to deal with just then.

Over the course of the last sixteen hours, Aerik had steadily grown
larger. Through the starboard portholes, the supeijovian appeared as an
enormous blue shield, its upper atmosphere striated by thin white cirrus
clouds. By the time I’d slugged down my third or fourth cup of coffee, Kha-
Zann had become visible as a reddish-brown orb in trojan orbit a little
less than a million miles from its primary. We couldn’t make out Kasi-
masta just yet, though; it was still on the opposite side of Aerik from the
Pride, and no one aboard would be able to see it until the ship initiated
the maneuvers that would swing it around the planet’s far side.

Yet we were all too aware that the Annihilator was coming. I had just
put on my headset when Ted informed me that the sensors had picked up

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a slight disturbance in Aerik’s gravity well, coming from an unseen
source approximately twelve million miles away. That sounded too far
away to worry about, until the skipper reminded me that Kasimasta was
traveling at four hundred miles per second. According to Ah’s calcula-
tions, the black hole would reach Kha-Zann in little more than eight
hours . . . which meant that Rain and I hadn’t much time to waste.

Fortunately, we didn’t have to cycle through the airlock on the way out.
Doc was waiting for us at the shuttle airlock; he insisted on giving our
suits a quick check-out, but I think he’d really come down from the bridge
to wish us good luck. Just before I climbed through the hatch, he pro-
duced a rabbit’s foot on a keychain, which he claimed had been in his
family for three generations. I really didn’t want the mangy thing, but
Doc was adamant about me taking it along, so I let him clip it to the zip-
per of my left shoulder pocket. A solemn handshake for me, a kiss on the
cheek for Rain, and then the chief pronounced us fit to travel.

Doc had just shut the hatch behind us when we heard the muffled
clang of two bells. Ah was about to commence the rollover maneuver that
would precede the deceleration bum. So Rain and I hustled into the cock-
pit; we’d just strapped ourselves into our seats when we felt the abrupt
cessation of g-force, signaling that the main engine had been cut off. As I
began to power up the shuttle, there was the swerving sensation of the
Pride doing a one-eighty on its short axis. Emily’s voice came over the
comlink; a quick run-through of the checklist, and when everything came
up green we went straight into a thirty-second countdown.

Loose Lucy detached from the docking collar, and for a few moments
the Pride seemed to hang motionless just outside the cockpit windows.
Then I fired the RCS to ease us away from the ship, and our respective
velocities changed; in the blink of an eye, the big freighter was gone, with
little more than a last glimpse of its forward deflector array. From the
seat beside me, Rain sighed; a couple of tiny bubbles that might have
been tears drifted away from the open faceplate of her helmet, but I didn’t
say anything about them.

As soon as the Pride was gone, I used the pitch and yaw thrusters to
turn Lucy around. Once she was pointed in the right direction, I switched
to autopilot and fired up the main engine. A muted rumble pushed us
back in our seats; a few seconds of that, then the engine cut off and we
were on the road to Kha-Zann.

Rain and I had decided we’d remain on cabin pressure until just before
we were ready to make touchdown, at which point we would close our hel-
mets and void the cabin. That way we’d save a little time by not having to
cycle through the airlock once we were on the ground. We’d also been
careful not to have any solid food for breakfast or lunch; our suits’ recy-
cling systems would get a good workout, but at least our diapers would
remain clean. And we’d stuffed our pockets with stim tabs and caffeine
pills; maybe we’d be too wired to sleep once we returned to the Pride, but
at least we wouldn’t doze off on this mission.

So she and I had thought of everything. Or at least we believed we had.
Even so, nothing could have prepared us for our first sight of Kasimasta.

I had just removed my helmet and was bending over to stow it beneath

Galaxy Blues — Conclusion: The Great Beyond

February 2008

my seat when Rain gasped. Looking up, I noticed she was staring past me
out the windows. I turned my head, and for a moment all I saw was
Aerik, which by then had swelled to almost fill the portside windows. Im-
pressive, but . . .

Then I saw what she’d seen, and felt my heart go cold. Coming into
view from behind the limb of the planet was something that, at first
glance, resembled an enormous eye. Red-rimmed, as if irritated by some-
thing caught in the cloudy white mass of its pupil, it wept a vast tear that
seemed to fall away into space. Altogether, it resembled the balefiil glare
of an angry god.

So this was Kasimasta: a cyclops among the stars. Although still sever-
al million miles away, it was awesome, and utterly terrifying. The black
hole at its nucleus was invisible to us, surrounded by the ionized gas that
made up its ergosphere, but we knew that it was there, just as we knew
that nothing could survive an encounter with the ring of dust and debris
that swirled at sublight velocities around its outer event horizon.

As we watched, Kasimasta slowly moved toward the cockpit’s center
window . . . and stayed there. Loose Lucy was taking us straight toward
the moon that lay between us and it. I had an impulse to disengage the
autopilot, turn the shuttle around, and flee for . . . well, anywhere but
there. An insane notion; there was no way Lucy could catch up with the
Pride, just as it would be impossible to outrun the monster before it
caught up with us. Like it or not, we were committed.

For a minute or so, neither of us said anything. Then we found our-
selves reaching out to take hold of each other’s hand. Despite the fact that
I hadn’t wanted her to come along, I suddenly realized I was glad Rain
was here.

Yeah. I’d picked a fine time to fall in love.

For a moon on the verge of destruction, Kha-Zann was strangely beau-
tiful. As Lucy closed in upon it, we looked down upon a world that some-
what resembled a miniature version of Mars, save for a noticeable lack of
polar ice caps. A reddish-brown surface, streaked here and there with
dark grey veins, whose cratered terrain was split and cracked by
labyrinthine networks of crevices, fissures, and canyons. Early morning
sunlight reflected off a thin, low-lying haze that quickly dissipated as the
day grew longer, with shadows stretching out from crater rims and
bumpy hills. Probably an interesting place to explore, if one had time to
do so.

But we weren’t there to take pictures and hunt for souvenirs. In fact,
all I really wanted to do was drop in, drop off, and drop out. So once we
were a couple of hundred miles away, I picked out what looked like a low-
risk landing site near the daylight terminator — a broad, flat plain just
north of the equator, away from any valleys and relatively clear of large
craters — then switched off the autopilot and took control of my craft
again.

By then, Rain and I had put our helmets on again; once we were
breathing suit air, she vented the cabin. A final cinch of our harnesses to

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make sure that they were secure, then I turned the shuttle around and
initiated the landing sequence. As we’d been told, Kha-Zann didn’t have
much in the way of an atmosphere; there was some chop as Lucy began
to make her descent, and an orange corona grew up from around the heat
shield. But it quickly faded, and alter a few seconds the turbulence ended
and we had a smooth ride down.

Even so, my hands were moist within my gloves as I clutched the yoke.
Sure, I had plenty of experience landing on the Moon and Mars, but nev-
er had I expected to touch down on a world ninety light-years from home.
Even putting down on Coyote in a stolen lifeboat wasn’t as butt-clench-
ing as this. Maybe it was because I was landing where no one — or at least
no human — had ever gone before. Or maybe it was simply because I was
all too aware that, if I screwed up, my life wouldn’t be the only one placed
in jeopardy.

In any case, my attention never left the instrument panel, and I kept a
sharp eye on the aft cams and the eightball all the way down. Rain
helped by reciting the altimeter readout, but it wasn’t until Lucy was six
hundred feet above the ground and I was certain that there were no sur-
prises waiting for us at the touchdown point that I lowered the landing
gear and throttled up the engine for final descent.

We landed with little more than a hard thump, but I didn’t breathe easy
until I’d safed the engine and put all systems on standby. Through the
windows, the dust we’d kicked up was already beginning to settle, reveal-
ing a barren landscape beneath a dark purple sky. We’d landed in the last
hour of the afternoon, on the side of Kha-Zann that still faced the sun; to
the east, just beyond the short horizon, Aerik was beginning to rise. Kasi-
masta was nowhere to be seen, but I knew that the Annihilator would
soon make its appearance.

“Okay, no time for sightseeing.” I unbuckled my harness. “Let’s do this
and get out of here.”

“Really? No kidding .” Rain was already out of her seat. “I sort of
thought we could look for a nice place to build a house.”

If I’d been listening a little more carefully to what she’d just said, I
might have given her a double-take. Perhaps she was only being sarcas-
tic, but it might have been a serious proposition. The only plans I had for
us were no more than a couple of hours in the future, so my response was
nothing more than a distracted grunt as I followed her from the cockpit.

In Earth-normal gravity, the probe probably weighed about two hun-
dred pounds; on Kha-Zann, though, it was only one-fifth of that. The case
was bulky, though, so it took both of us to load it aboard the elevator. Once
it was securely lashed to the pallet, I opened the cargo hatch. The doors
creaked softly as they parted, and a handful of red sand, caught upon an
errant breeze, drifted into the hold. I used the elevator controls to rotate
the T-bar of the overhead crane into position, then I turned to Rain.

“You know how to operate this, right?” I pointed to the joystick. “Up for
up, down for down, and it stops in the middle. Take it easy when you low-
er me, though, because I don’t want to . . .”

“ You’re not going down there” She shook her head within her helmet. “I
am. You’re staying here.”

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February 2008

“No, you’re not. This is my job. You’re . . .”

“Jules . . .”

“We don’t have time for this. One of us needs to stay behind to run the
elevator. You’re the cargo master, so that’s you. End of discussion.” I
paused. “If I get into any trouble down there, Fll tell you . . . but I should
be able to handle this by myself. Just do your job, and with any luck we’ll
be out of here before the engines cool down. All right?”

Before she had a chance to argue any further, I stepped into the cage. I
suppose I should have been impressed by Rain’s willingness to accept the
risk, but I was stronger than her, and it would take muscles to manhan-
dle the crate from the elevator and haul it a safe distance from the shut-
tle. She pouted for another moment or so, but surrendered to the in-
evitable. Once I’d grabbed hold of the hand rails on either side of the cage,
I gave her a nod, and Rain pushed the levers that raised the cage from its
resting position and telescoped the T-bar through the hatch.

The breeze was a little stiffer than I’d expected. The cage gently rocked
back and forth on its cables, and I held on tight and planted my boots
firmly against the pallet. Once the crane was extended to its full length, I
told Rain to lower away. The cage shuddered and jerked a bit on the way
down, but I didn’t worry much about it; the elevator had a load capacity of
one and a half tons. It was just the wind giving me a hassle.

It only took a couple of minutes to reach the ground. As soon as the
cage touched down, I untied the crate and, taking hold of its handles,
picked it up and carried it off the elevator. Even in the lesser gravity, the
crate was just heavy enough to make it hard work; if I hadn’t been bur-
dened with it, I might have been able to bunny-hop across the desert
floor. As it was, though, I found it was just as easy to put the crate down,
then pick up one end by its handle and drag it behind me.

“What’s it like down there?” Rain asked.

I stopped to look up at her. She was standing in the open hatch, watch-
ing me from above. “Like Kansas,” I replied, “only without cornfields. Ever
been there?”

A short laugh. “You kidding ? I’ve never even been to Earth”

I’d forgotten that. “I’ll take you sometime. To Earth, I mean . . . believe
me, you can skip Kansas.” I started to pick up the case again, then
paused. “Hey, if you’re not doing anything, patch into the long-range com
and see if you can reach the Pride. They might be back in range by now.”

“Wilco” There was a click as she switched from one band to another.
Not waiting for a response, I went back to work.

The terrain was rough, its coarse sand strewn with rocks the size of
baseballs. Every so often I’d have to veer around boulders or haul the
crate through small pits formed by micrometeorite impacts. Through my
helmet, I could hear the faint moan of the wind; the atmosphere wasn’t
dense enough to hold up a kite, but I still had to use my free hand to clear
silt from my faceplate.

It took about fifteen minutes to drag the crate nearly a hundred yards
from the shuttle; I figured that was far enough to keep the probe from be-
ing damaged by Lucy’s exhaust flare once we lifted off. I checked the
chronometer on my heads-up display; we’d been on Kha-Zann for just

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over half an hour, so time was getting short. I opened the crate and tossed
away the lid, then reached inside. The probe wasn’t hard to remove; a cou-
ple of hard tugs at its rungs, and it came straight out of its packing mate-
rial.

“No word from the Pride yet,” Rain said, “but that’s probably because I’m
getting a lot of static. How are you doing out there?”

“Almost done.” I grunted as I carried the sphere a few feet from the
crate, then gently placed it on the ground. It rolled a couple of inches, forc-
ing me to roll it back so that its top hexagon was positioned right-side up.
Once I was satisfied that it wasn’t going anywhere, I pressed the blue
button on the control hex.

The button lit up, but nothing happened. I waited a second, uncertain
whether or not the thing was working, then I pushed the red button. This
time, the reaction was immediate; the panels surrounding the lower
hemisphere sprang open, and small multijointed legs unfolded from with-
in the sphere, their horseshoe-like pads firmly anchoring the probe
against the ground.

I pushed the white button, and had to jump back quickly to avoid the
rest of the panels as they peeled apart to reveal a smaller sphere hidden
inside. From the probe’s core, a narrow cylinder raised itself upon a stalk,
then unfurled to become a dish antenna. The hyperlink transmitter, no
doubt. As it swiveled around to point toward the sun, two more cylinders
rose into view; judging from the lenses at their ends, I figured they were
multispectrum cameras. One of them rotated toward me, and I took an-
other step back. Realizing that it looked straight at me, I restrained an
impulse to wave at whomever might be watching. Or perhaps give them
an obscene gesture.

A slender wand shot out from the core, then buried itself in the sand;
that must be the seismometer. And meanwhile, valves opened and flut-
tered, wands were elevated, fights began to flash. It was like some weird
toy that belonged to an equally weird kid.

“Jules . . .”

“Wow.” I stared at the probe in amazement. “You should see this thing.
It’s like some kind of . . .”

“ Jules . . . look up”

Something in Rain’s voice gave me a chill. Turning around, I raised my
eyes toward the sky, and immediately forgot about the probe.

While I’d been busy hauling the crate out into the desert and deploying
the probe, the sun had begun to set. Aerik had fully risen into view, but
that wasn’t what got my attention. It was Kasimasta.

I couldn’t see all of the Annihilator, but what I could was enough to
freeze my blood. The edge of its accretion belt was coming up over the
horizon, with the nimbus of its ergosphere just behind it. The damned
thing was four or five times larger than when we’d first seen it, and no
longer looked like an eye, but rather the storm front of a hurricane might-
ier than the wrath of God.

And it was heading straight toward us.

“Hell with this.” I forced myself to breathe. “We’re outta here.” And then
I tinned and began to high-tail it back to Lucy.

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103

February 2008

No longer encumbered by the crate, there was nothing to prevent me
from bunny-hopping. The gravity and atmospheric pressure were just low
enough for me to make broad jumps that covered five or six feet at a time,
just as I learned to do in Academy basic training on the Moon. Yet I had-
n’t covered half the distance between the probe and the shuttle when I
went sprawling face-first across the ground.

Under other circumstances, it might have been funny. Spacer fall down,
go boom. And my reflexes were good; I managed to raise my arms and
cover my helmet faceplate before it was cracked open by a rock. But
nonetheless, I knew at once that this was no mere accident; I hadn’t
tripped over anything, nor had my last jump been misguided.

The ground had moved beneath my feet.

I was picking myself up when I felt it again, a mild tremor that caused
the sand beneath my hands and knees to shift ever so slightly. At that in-
stant, Rain’s voice came to me through my headset: “Jules, get back here!
We’re getting . . . /”

“Earthquakes. I know.” I struggled erect, continued running toward the
shuttle. Fortunately it had remained stable, its landing gear still firmly
resting upon the ground. I knew, though, that if the tremors became
much more violent, there was a good chance the craft would be rocked so
hard that one of its legs might snap ... in which case, we wouldn’t be
leaving Kha-Zann.

Rain remained at her post until I reached the elevator; I’d barely
climbed aboard when she put the crane in reverse and began to haul me
back upstairs. The wind had picked up as well; I had to hold on tight as
the cage swung back and forth, and I didn’t feel safe until it reached the
top and she’d retracted the T-bar into the hold. Yet that safety was little
more than temporary; we had to get off Kha-Zann PDQ.

While Rain stayed below to shut the hatch and lock everything down, I
scrambled up to the cockpit and got Lucy ready to fly. Fd just powered up
the engine when she joined me on the flight deck. No time for a prelaunch
checklist; I did my best to make sure I hadn’t neglected anything, but
even as we were strapping ourselves in, another tremor passed through
the hull, this one violent enough to scare me into thinking that the ship
was about to topple over.

Rain felt it, too. Her eyes were wide on the other side of her faceplate.
“Jules . . .”

“Hang on, sweetie. We’re gone.” And then I fired the engine.

Launch was more difficult than landing. By then the wind had picked
up sufficient speed that, if I had been attempting to lift off from Mars, the
ground controller would’ve probably called a scrub. But I didn’t have the
luxury of waiting for optimal weather conditions; no choice, in fact, but to
root hog or die. So I kept the engine at full throttle all the way up and
gripped the yoke with both hands as Lucy clawed her way into the sky,
her hull plates creaking ominously with every bump and jolt she took.

In less than a minute, though, it was all over. The sky darkened, purple
turning jet black; the rattle faded away and everything smoothed out. On
the screens, the aft cams captured a brief glimpse of Kha-Zann falling

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away, our landing site no longer visible. Then the moon disappeared
somewhere behind us and we were back in space.

Rain let out her breath. “Nice flying, pilot,” she murmured. “If I wasn’t
wearing this thing, I’d give you a kiss”

“Save it for later.” I was still on manual, but since we were through the
rough patch, I throttled down the engines and engaged the autopilot. “See
if you can raise the Pride. We should be able to get her by now.”

“Right.” She reached over to the com panel, patched us into the long-
range relay. “Loose Lucy to Pride of Cucamonga, do you copy?”

A moment of static, then Emily’s voice came over: “We copy, Lucy. What
took you so long?”

I almost laughed out loud. “Sorry ’bout that, Pride. Had a bit of a ...” I
stopped myself. “Never mind. Mission accomplished and we’re off the
ground. That’s all that counts. What’s your position?”

A brief pause, then Ted came online. “We’re on course for the rendezvous
point, same coordinates as before. ETA in forty-seven minutes. Think you
can make it?”

“Hold on.” I finished reloading the program, then checked the comp dis-
play. Everything was copasetic; we’d arrive with just enough time and
fuel to spare. “Roger that. We’re on the beam and on our way for pickup.”

“Very good. We’ll see you there.” Another pause. “Good work, guys. And,
by the way . . . Mr. Goldstein has asked me to extend his compliments.”

“Oh, how lovely” Rain muttered. “Be still, my beating heart.”

“Repeat, please? I’m afraid we have some interference.”

“Negatory, Pride. Just some static. Lucy over and out.” I made the kill
sign, and grinned at Rain once she’d switched off. “What do you want to
bet Morgan gives you the pink slip for that?”

“Ask me if I ...” Her voice trailed off as she gazed toward the starboard
side. “Oh, god ”

I looked past her, and was suddenly grateful for having had the fore-
sight to wear diapers. Kasimasta filled the windows. Its accretion belt re-
sembled a whirlpool of colored dyes, its ergosphere as bright as a star.
Now that it had entered Aerik’s orbit, the Annihilator’s gravity well was
beginning to affect the planet itself. Aerik’s night side was turned toward
the rogue, and even from the distance we could see brilliant flashes of
lightning within its darkened skies, like the death throes of a swarm of
fireflies, while the blue clouds of its daylight side seemed to writhe and
roil in agony.

But that wasn’t all. Aerik was no longer a perfect sphere; its equator
was showing a pronounced bulge, as if it were a massive balloon that was
being squeezed at its poles. As I watched, a wispy stream of blue-white
haze slowly began to move outward from the planet’s upper atmosphere.
Kasimasta wasn’t just a killer; it was a vampire, the vast mouth of its sin-
gularity drawing blood from its latest victim in the form of hydrogen and
helium. Kha-Zann would be little more than an appetizer for such a vo-
racious appetite.

It was hard to be sure, but I guessed that Kasimasta was about a half-
million miles away. Way too close for comfort. I fought the impulse to throt-
tle up the engine. Our rendezvous window had been calculated with pre-

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cious little margin for error; if we arrived too early, we would miss Pride
just as surely as if we’d been marooned on Kha-Zann. I couldn’t afford to
take that chance; like it or not, Fd have to place my faith in Ali’s calculations.

The next forty minutes were the longest in my life. There was nothing
for us to do except wait for Lucy to intercept the Pride. If I’d brought a
deck of cards, I might have broken them out and had a few hands of pok-
er with Rain; as things stood, though, we could only stay on the lookout
for our ship.

I was just beginning to regret not having written my last will and tes-
tament — not that I had much to bequeath anyone — when the lidar
beeped; something was coming within range. A minute later, a tiny cruci-
form appeared through the starboard windows, its shape outlined by the
red and green flashes of its formation lights. Rain and I were still whoop-
ing it up when Emily’s voice came over the radio.

“Pride to Lucy, do you copy T

Rain toggled the com, then nodded to me. “Affirmative, Pride ,” I said.
“Great to see you again.” A quick glance at the nav panel. “On course for
rendezvous and docking.”

“ Roger that” Now we heard from Ted. “ Ready to match course and ve-
locity”

“Copy.” I disengaged the autopilot one last time, then put my hands
back on the yoke. Next was the tricky part. Although the Pride had cut its
thrust, its momentum was still such that Lucy would have to run hard in
order to catch up with it. Fd have to expand the last of our fuel in order to
do so.

But if all went well, it wouldn’t matter. And if it didn’t go so well . . .

I pushed that out of my mind. Keeping my eyes fixed on the instrument
panels, I kicked up the engine, coaxing the shuttle closer to the ren-
dezvous point. The next few minutes were as harrowing as any in my life,
but when I looked up again, it seemed as though the Pride were hanging
motionless directly before us, its docking collar a big, fat bull’s-eye that a
rookie couldn’t have missed.

I was just about to let out a sigh of relief when Doc’s voice came over
the com. “ Jules, is your cabin still depressurized T

“Roger that.” Fd been too busy to think about that. “Want us to pres-
surize?”

“ Affirmative . I’ll be waiting for you at the airlock. Over.”

“Copy. Over” I glanced at Rain. “What do you think that’s all about?”

“ Guess he wants to save time by not having us cycle through.” She
reached up to the environmental control panel. “ TU handle this. Just keep
your eyes on the road.”

She needn’t have worried. A few final squirts of the thrusters, and a
couple of minutes later there was the welcome jolt of the docking flanges
connecting. I shut down the engine and major systems, then reached for-
ward to pat the instrument panel.

“Thank you, sweetheart,” I whispered. “You’re a good girl.”

I didn’t know it then, but those were my last words to Lucy. Doc was
waiting for us at the airlock, just as he said he’d be. As soon as we were
aboard, he slammed the hatch shut behind us.

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“Sorry, Jules,” he said, unable to look me in the eye, “but we’re going to
have to ditch her.”

“What?” Rain and I had already removed our helmets; I gaped at him,
not believing what I’d just heard. “Why do you. . . ?”

“Skipper’s orders. We can’t spare the extra mass, so . . .”

I was about to argue with him when Ted’s voice came over my headset.
“ Jules! Get up here now! We’ve got an emergency F

EIGHTEEN

Never piss off a turtle . . . faster than dirt . . . doomsday . . . what’s
harder than flying a spaceship ?

I VII

headed straight for the bridge, leaving Rain behind to help Doc jettison
Lucy. There wasn’t enough time to pay last respects; I’d grieve for the loss
of my ride later, if and when we survived. Ted hadn’t told me what had
happened, and he didn’t need to: when the captain says jump, everyone
makes like a frog.

I was halfway up the access shaft before I realized that I was still using
the hand rails. If we were in zero-g, that meant the ship was still coasting.
Now that Rain and I were safely back aboard, though, the main engine
should have been on fire and Pride should have been at full thrust. I was
trying to figure this out when the bridge hatch slammed open and Emily
came through, her left arm curled around something that, at first glance,
looked like a bundle of clothes upon which someone had spilled ketchup.
“Make a hole!” she yelled. “Coming through!”

I flattened myself against the shaft as much as possible; hard to do,
since I was still wearing my EVA gear. When she got closer, I saw that the
object in tow was a person: Ali Youssef, unconscious, with a blood-stained
shirt wrapped around his chest as a makeshift bandage.

“What the hell...?”

“Jas attacked him.” Emily squeezed past me, using her free hand to
grasp the rails. “No time to explain. Get up top . . . Ted needs you to take
the helm.” I couldn’t get anything more out of her, though, because she
continued to haul Ali down to Deck Three, no doubt taking him to the
med bay. She glanced back at me, saw that I’d frozen. “Move!”

That snapped me out of it. Hand over hand, I scrambled the rest of the
way up the shaft. The hatch was still open; I sailed headfirst through the
manhole, nearly spraining my wrist as I grabbed a ceiling rail to brake
myself. Ted was on the other side of the console, floating next to the helm
station. He was bare-chested, and I realized that it was his shirt Ah was
wearing as a chest bandage.

“Come here and take over.” He didn’t raise his voice, nor did he need to.
“Course is already laid in . . . you just need to take the stick.”

I was wondering why he hadn’t done so himself when I saw the stun
gun in his right hand, and that he was using it to cover Mahamatasja Jas

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February 2008

Sa-Fhadda. The Prime Emissary was backed against hisher couch; heshe
was still wearing hisher weapon around hisher wrist. Behind himher,
Morgan Goldstein cowered against the bulkhead; for once he was speech-
less, apparently terrified by whatever had just happened.

“Skipper, what. . . ?”

“Just do it.” Ted grabbed a ceiling rail and pulled himself toward the en-
gineering station, carefully keeping his distance from Jas. “I’ll watch Jas.
Just . . .”

“I assure you, Captain, I mean you no harm.” The voice that emerged
from Jas’s environment suit was higher-pitched than I’d heard before. “I
was only defending myself. Mr. Youssef . . .”

“Shut up.” Ted didn’t take his eyes from himher. “Jules . . .”

“I’m on it.” Suspended within the holo tank was an image ofKasimasta;
one glance told me the Annihilator was way too close to our own position.
Pushing myself off the bulkhead, I sailed straight through the miniature
black hole, an irony that might have been poetic if I’d been in the mood
for such a thing. Just then, though, my main concern was taking control
of the helm and getting us away from the annihilator.

I grabbed hold of Ali’s seat and shoved it back as far as I could. Since I
was still wearing my suit, there was no way I could sit down, so instead I
anchored myself by shoving the toes of my boots within the foot rail be-
low the console. Bending over the console, I quickly studied the comp
readouts. They confirmed what Ted had told me; our course was set, and
all I needed to do was bring the ship around, point it in the right direc-
tion, and fire the main engine.

Silently thanking Ah for having shown me how to operate the helm, I
pulled off my gloves, tossed them aside, and rested my right hand on the
trackball. A faint tremor passed through the ship as I carefully rotated
the ball, firing maneuvering thrusters until the Pride was brought back
into proper trim. Once the x, y, and z axes were aligned, I locked in the
heading, then flipped back the cover of the ignition key. No time to sound
general quarters; I’d just have to hope that everyone below was holding
onto something.

“Main engine ignition, on your mark,” I said, glancing up at Ted.

“Mark.” He didn’t take his eyes from Jas.

A deep breath, and then I turned the key. Green lights flashed across
the console as the hull gently shuddered. I took hold of the thrust control
bar and pushed it forward, and the shudder became a smooth, steady vi-
bration. An invisible hand tried to push me over; nothing I could do about
that now, though, except adjust my stance, hang onto the edge of the con-
sole, and not let the g-force make me fall down.

For the moment, it seemed as though everything was fine. Then there
was a sudden jolt, as if something had hit the ship from behind. An in-
stant later, there was a gentle rattle against the outer hull, almost as if
we’d run into sleet. I glanced up at the overhead screen where the view
from the aft cam was displayed, and what I saw nearly gave me a heart
attack. Kasimasta completely filled the screen, the vast band of its accre-
tion belt rushing toward us. What we’d just felt was its bow shock; the
rattle was the sound of sand and dust hitting the ship.

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“Ted!” I snapped. “The deflector. . . !”

“Got it.” He reached down to adjust the forward deflector, turning it up
to full intensity. The rattle subsided as the field expanded to clear a path
for us, but it didn’t do anything for Kasimasta’s gravity well. The Pride was
shaking like a tree limb caught in the wind; all around us, I could hear deck
plates groaning. If only the main engine had been fired sooner . . .

No time to worry about that now. The ship was just a few seconds away
from being pulled into the accretion belt. Whatever we were going to do,
we needed to do it fast.

I prodded my headset. “Rain, are you and Doc ready to detach LucyT

“ Roger that. Inner hatch sealed, outer hatch still open, cradle and dock-
ing collar disengaged.”

I looked at Ted again. He nodded, then snapped a pair of switches, and
an instant later there was a hard kick from the port side as Loose Lucy
was jettisoned. Now I understood why Doc had insisted that we repres-
surize the cabin; the blowout helped knock the shuttle away from the
ship.

“Sorry, Lucy” I muttered. “You were a good old bird.”

Ted glanced at me. He said nothing, but his face was grim. We’d light-
ened our load by a couple of hundred tons, but even that wouldn’t be
enough to save us. One way or another, we had to find a way to outrun
Kasimasta.

All at once, I figured out how to do it . . . and found myself grinning. Rais-
ing my eyes from the controls, I looked across the compartment at Mor-
gan. “Say, Mr. Goldstein . . . how much would you give me to save your
life?”

He stared back at me. “What?”

“You heard what I said. How much would you give me to. . . ?”

“Anything!” He couldn’t believe that this was a matter open to discus-
sion. “Whatever you want . . . just do it!”

“Thank you.” I looked at Ted again. “How about you, skipper? Anything
you’d like from Mr. Goldstein in exchange for his life?”

For a second, Ted gaped at me as if I’d just lost my mind. Then he
caught on. “Sure,” he said, his right hand creeping across the engineering
console. “I can think of one or two . . .”

“For God’s sakes!” Morgan glanced at the nearest window. “Whatever
you want, you can have it. Just hurry . . . !”

“Very well, then.” Ted rested his fingertips on a pair of switches, then
snapped them. “Jettisoning cargo modules.”

If Morgan had any objections — and I had no doubt that he did — they
were lost in the warning alarm of the emergency pyros being fired. Two
hard thumps, and Cargo One and Cargo Two were decoupled from the
hub. I glanced up at the screens in time to see two massive cylinders tum-
ble away from the ship, taking with them forty crates of alien knick-
knacks.

Morgan stared in horror as his payload fell toward Kasimasta. For
something that he’d once derided as all but worthless, he certainly
seemed upset by their sacrifice. He didn’t seem to notice the abrupt
change of velocity as the Pride, having shed nearly one-fourth its mass,

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109

February 2008

surged forward. Leave it to a businessman to put a higher value on his
merchandise than his own life.

I held my breath as I watched my instruments. The delta-V was steadi-
ly increasing, just as I thought it would. Another brief tremor as the Pride
crossed the bow shock once more, and then we were racing away from
Kasimasta, accelerating beyond reach of its accretion belt.

The ship stopped shaking, and I slowly let out my breath. “I think we’re
going to make it,” I murmured, then I looked over at Ted. “Now . . . would
someone mind telling me why I’m here?”

Ted wiped sweat from his forehead. “Ah lost his temper and attacked
Jas, and Jas shot him. That’s pretty much it, in a nutshell.”

“For the love of . . .” I’d seen this coming, sure, but nonetheless I couldn’t
believe it. “Why?”

“Heshe said that we should have left you behind, made a run for it to
save ourselves.” Ted glared at Jas. “Perhaps that’s something the hjadd
do, Prime Emissary” he added, his voice rising in anger, “but we humans
have a slightly higher standard.”

“It was only an observation, Captain.” Jas settled into hisher couch.
“Nothing more. I did not expect your pilot to react so violently.”

“Yes, well . . . your own reaction left something to be desired.” Ted
looked at Morgan. “Mr. Goldstein . . . Morgan ... if you’re through crying
over spilled milk, you can make yourself useful and disarm your friend.”

Morgan’s eyes widened. “I can’t . . .”

“Yes, you will ... or I’ll be tempted to lessen our load by a few more ki-
los.” Ted hefted the stunner. “Glad I had this squirreled away. Never
thought I’d actually have to use it, though.”

I nodded, but said nothing. Although it wasn’t standard operating pro-
cedure, ship captains often concealed a sidearm somewhere aboard the
bridge, in the event of mutiny or a possible hijack attempt. Such occur-
rences were so rare, most spacers considered them unlikely. This time,
though, I was glad my CO had erred on the side of caution.

Morgan hesitated, then turned to Jas. The Prime Emissary had already
removed hisher bracelet; heshe pushed something on its side that might
have been a safety catch, then surrendered the weapon to Morgan. “My
most profound apologies, Captain. It was never my intent to put this ship
in danger.”

“Right.” Ted stood up and walked over to Morgan, who reluctantly gave
the bracelet to him. “Now go below to your cabin. Til summon you once we
rendezvous with the starbridge.”The Prime Emissary rose from hisher seat,
started toward the manhole. “And Jas . . . next time we jump, no tricks.”

Jas said nothing, but hisher head briefly moved back and forth in the
hjadd affirmative. Then heshe disappeared down the access shaft, with
Morgan behind him/her. Ted watched them go, then sighed as he dropped
the bracelet on the seat behind him.

“God, what a nightmare.” He shoved the stunner into his belt, then
massaged his eyes with his fingertips. “If I ever let an alien aboard this
ship again . . .”

“You and me both.” Then I chuckled. “Hey . . . trade you a spacesuit for
a shirt.”

Allen M. Steele

Asimov's

Ted looked at me, and a wry grin slowly appeared on his face. “Go on,
get out of here.” Going over to the helm, he pulled up the seat and sat
down. “I’ll stand watch . . . but just do me one favor.”

“What’s that?”

He rubbed at the goose pimples on his arms. “Fetch me another shirt.
I’m freezing.”

vra

I went below to the ready room and got out of my suit, then went up to
Deck Three and dropped by the med bay to check on Ali. Emily was still
with him; she’d managed to carry our pilot to the autodoc, where she’d
placed him on the table and activated the system. When I found her, she
was standing outside the surgical cell, gazing through the window as the
’bot’s insectile hands stitched the wounds in Ali’s chest. He was kept se-
dated, with a gas mask over his face and IV lines feeding fluids into his
veins.

“He caught four darts,” Emily said, motioning to a small kidney tray on
the stand next to the table. “Lucky they didn’t have enough forward ve-
locity to pierce the rib cage, or he’d be dead by now.”

I peered at the tray. Within it were four bloodstained flechettes, each no
larger than a fingernail yet razor sharp. Apparently human bones were a
little tougher than a hj add’s, because a couple of them looked as if they
had fractured upon impact. Still, it was enough to make my blood turn
cold. “And Jas shot him because. . . T

“Ali wigged out when Jas said that you and Rain should’ve been left be-
hind. Happened right after you docked.” Emily sighed, shook her head. “I
know, I know. It’s stupid, but . . . guess the pressure finally got to him.” I
nodded, regretting the fact that I’d neglected to mention Ash’s warning to
anyone. Stupid of me not to take him more seriously. “At any rate,” she
went on, “I’m just glad you made it back in time to take over the helm.”

“Yeah, well ... so am I.” I looked around the med bay. “Where’s Rain?”

“Don’t know. Maybe in her cabin. She looked pretty beat.” She glanced
at me. “How did it go down there?”

“Piece of cake.” I was too tired to talk about it; just then, all I really
wanted to do was get a shirt for Ted, then have something to eat and
maybe catch a few winks. I looked at Ali once more. “How long do you
think it’ll be until he’s up and about?”

“Not soon enough for him to do his job again, if that’s what you’re ask-
ing.” Emily smiled, patted my shoulder. “Don’t fret about it. Ted and I will
take turns at the helm until you’ve had a chance to recuperate.”

I thanked her, then left the med bay and went up to Deck Two. A quick
stop by Ted’s cabin to grab a shirt from his bag, then I headed for the ac-
cess shaft again . . . but not before I stopped at Rain’s quarters. The cabin
door was shut. I lingered outside for a moment, considering whether or
not I should knock, before deciding that I owed her a nap. I hadn’t seen
Ash since we’d returned, but his cabin was quiet as well. I figured that
he’d probably passed out again.

Ted was still at the helm when I returned to the bridge. He was grate-
ful for the shirt, but said that he didn’t need to have me take over just yet.

Galaxy Blues — Conclusion: The Great Beyond

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February 2008

I went back down to Deck Two, where I made myself some lunch in the
wardroom. I was about halfway through a tomato and cheese sandwich
when the door slammed open and Morgan barged in.

“Who do you think you are, jettisoning those modules without my per-
mission?”

I took my time swallowing what was in my mouth before answering
him, “You’re welcome.”

That brought him up short. “What?”

“Oh, I’m sorry ... I thought you’d come to thank me.” I pushed aside the
rest of my sandwich. “I asked what you’d give for me to save your life. You
said anything, and I assumed that would include the cargo.” I picked up a
napkin and wiped my mouth. “Silly me. Didn’t know you thought gnoshes
were more important than your skin.”

Morgan scowled at me. “That was completely unnecessary. We could’ve
gotten away without . . .”

“Probably not. Once we shed the extra mass, the ship was able to reach
escape velocity . . . but not before then.” I wadded up the napkin and
pitched it at the disposal chute, and got two points for a perfect shot. “Ask
the skipper if you don’t believe me. It was his decision, not mine.”

Ted couldn’t have picked a better moment to call. Morgan was still
mustering a retort when my headset chirped. “Jules, where are you right
now?”

“Wardroom,” I replied. “Need me back up there?”

“ Negatory . Stay where you are, but turn on the monitors. Tm going to
patch you into the aft cams . . . there’s something you really ought to see.”

Standing up from my chair, I reached up to switch on the flatscreens
above the table . . . and promptly forgot how to breathe. Displayed on the
screens was a departure angle view. With the cargo modules gone, the
ship’s stem was clearly visible, yet it wasn’t that Ted wanted me to see.

Now that we’d put some distance between ourselves and Kasimasta, it
once again resembled a cyclopean eye. Kha-Zann had disappeared, and a
chill trickled down my back as I realized that the small world upon which
I’d walked only a few hours earlier had been reduced to little more than
dust and rubble. And now the Annihilator’s angry glare was fixed upon
Aerik.

The supeijovian was no longer a distinct sphere, but rather a bauble at
the end of an immense rope. Captured by the intense attraction of the
rogue black hole, the planet was being pulled apart; a vast blue-white
stream of gas flowed outward from what had once been its equator, curl-
ing across space to become part of Kasimasta’s ever-expanding accretion
belt. It was impossible to tell with the naked eye, but I didn’t need the
ship’s sensors to know that Aerik’s mass had already been reduced by
half.

“Oh, my . . .” Morgan stared at the screens as if not quite believing the
vast forces on display. “It’s . . . it’s . . .”

“Yup. Ain’t it, though?” I pointed to the accretion belt. “See that? There’s
where you and I would be right now if we hadn’t dumped the modules.
Want to go back and look for them?”

Morgan didn’t say a word, but the look in his eyes told me that he’d fi-

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nally comprehended the fate we’d barely avoided. “Have a sandwich,” I
added, then I left the wardroom and headed for my cabin.

I slept like a stone for the next twelve hours or so, stirring only when I
felt the shudder of maneuvering thrusters being fired to correct our
course back to Nordash. When I finally woke up, it was to the sound of
Ash’s guitar coming through the air vent. I listened for a little while, let-
ting my mind replay the events of the previous day, before deciding that I
really should report back to the command center. With Ali down for the
count, I’d become the Pride’s de facto pilot; time to go topside and take
over the helm again.

So I fell out of the sack and put on a fresh change of clothes. Ash was
still noodling at his guitar when I left my cabin. I thought about dropping
in, but changed my mind and instead went down the corridor to visit
Rain. I hadn’t seen or heard from her since we’d gotten back from Kha-
Zann; she might want to talk about what we’d been through.

Her door was still shut, and there was no answer when I knocked. At
first I thought she wasn’t in, but when I tried the door, I found that it was
locked from the inside. I knocked again, this time calling her name, but
again there was no reply. I was beginning to get worried, so I headed back
down the corridor, intending to inform Ted that Rain . . . well, Fm not sure
what I would’ve told the captain, other than expressing vague misgivings
about one of my crewmates . . . when Ash abruptly stopped playing his
guitar.

“She doesn’t want to talk to you,” he said from behind the door of his
cabin.

I started to say something, but again he beat me to it. “Seriously. She
doesn’t want to see you right now. If I were you, I’d leave her alone.”

He already knew I was there, so I didn’t bother to knock, but instead
slid open his door. Ash was in his hammock, guitar lying across his chest.
There were dark circles under his eyes, and I could tell from the absence
of booze on his breath that he was sober.

“Been dry since yesterday,” he said, in response to my unasked ques-
tion. “That little party we had the other night pretty much pissed away
the last of my supply.” Ash idly strummed at his guitar. “That’s why Fm
staying away from you guys. Too many strong emotions right now ... es-
pecially from you and her.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, c’mon.” He looked at me askance. “Maybe you can hide from each
other, or even from yourselves, but you can’t hide from me. A lot has
changed between the two of you, and ...” He shook his head. “Go on, get
out of here. Please. It hurts too damn much to be around you.”

Perhaps I should’ve left him alone, but his comfort was the least of my
concerns. “Sorry, Gordon,” I said, closing the door behind me. “Can’t do
that. Not until you tell me what’s going on.”

Ash said nothing for a moment, then he let out his breath as a long
sigh. “YTmow, it almost would’ve been easier if you guys had failed.” Prop-
ping his guitar against the bulkhead, he sat up in his hammock, slinging

Galaxy Blues — Conclusion: The Great Beyond

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February 2008

his legs over the side until his bare feet almost touched the floor. “In fact,
I kinda thought that was what would happen. The shuttle would crash,
or you’d miss the rendezvous . . . and that would’ve been it.”

I stared at him, not quite believing I’d heard what he’d said. “Is that
what you wanted?”

“Oh, no, no . . . not at all.” He winced, perhaps from the second-hand im-
pact of my emotions. “I’m happy you made it back, really I am. But — ” he
hesitated “ — do you remember what she told you? When you suggested
that she spend the night with you, I mean.”

My face felt warm. “Ummm . . .”

“Right. And so does she . . . but the truth is, deep down inside, she real-
ly didn’t think she’d have to make good on that promise.” He forced a
smile. “And then you had to screw things up and . . .”

“Yeah, okay, I get the picture.” Then I shook my head. “No, I don’t. I
mean, that was something I did when I was drunk. She doesn’t have to . . .”

“You know something, Jules? You talk too much. Just shut up and lis-
ten.” Ash waited until he was sure that I wouldn’t interrupt him again,
then went on. “If you think you’re confused . . . well, so is she, and even
more so. If it were just about sex, that would be easy. You guys hop in the
sack and bang each other’s brains out. Problem solved. But the fact is
you’re in love with her, and she’s falling for you, too, and neither of you
know what to do about it.”

Bending forward, he clutched at his head. “God, I need a drink. Just get
out of here, okay? Leave me alone.”

There was little else for me to say, so I eased out of his cabin, shutting
the door behind me. For a few moments, I stood in the corridor, uncertain
of what to do next, then I finally decided to head up to the bridge.

Sure, I knew how to handle a spaceship. But I didn’t have a clue how to
handle a woman.

NINETEEN

The deserted world . . . return to Talus qua’spah . . . another point of
view ... a line in the sand.

H X

alf a day later, the Pride returned to Nordash. I was back in the pi-
lot’s seat again by then, and had initiated the braking maneuver that
would slow the ship down and put it on course for rendezvous with the
nord starbridge. Through the bridge windows, Kasimasta was a distant
blur little less than half an a.u. away; at that distance, it looked no more
threatening than a cloud of interstellar dust and gas.

Yet even if the Annihilator wasn’t going to collide with Nordash, the
planet was doomed. Once Kasimasta passed close enough to HD 70642
for its intense gravity to have an effect upon the star, solar flares would
be kicked up that would bake the planet’s surface. As the Pride made its
primary approach to the starbridge, we saw that the vast armada that

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had greeted us only a couple of days earlier had disappeared. Apparently
the nord had completed the evacuation of their world; if any of their kind
had been left behind, they were helpless against the monster rapidly clos-
ing in on them. In any event, there was no traffic around the alien star-
bridge, nor did we receive any radio transmissions. Nordash was an aban-
doned house, its former residents long gone.

Once again, I performed a one-eighty that turned the Pride around,
then fired the maneuvering thrusters that would put us on a proper
heading for the ring. Everyone was in the command center except for Ah;
although he’d regained consciousness, Ted had relieved him from duty
and confined him to the med bay until we returned to Coyote. So the ship
was mine, and I’d be lying if I said that I minded having the stick. Per-
haps I’d lost Loose Lucy, but being able to fly the Pride of Cucamonga, at
least for a little while, more than made up for it.

As we closed in upon the starbridge, Jas left hisher seat and used the
ceiling rails to pull himherself over to my station. I was relieved to see
that the Prime Emissary no longer wore hisher weapon; at Ted’s insis-
tence, Jas had left it in hisher quarters. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but
feel nervous as Jas reached past me to insert hisher key into the hjadd
navigation system. Nor was I the only one who was on edge. From the
other side of the console, Ted kept an eye on Jas as heshe entered fresh
coordinates into the keypad.

“You are taking us back to Talus qua’spah, aren’t you?” he said at last.
“No surprises, right?”

Jas’s head rose slightly upon hisher long neck. “There is no deception,
Captain Harker. Your ship has been programmed to return to Hjarr.” The
Prime Emissary turned to me. “You may now engage the control system,
Mr. Truffaut.”

I looked over at Ted. He gave me a nod, so I took a deep breath and
switched to autopilot. Lights flashed across my panel, telling me that the
Pride's AI was slaved to the starbridge. Now I knew exactly how Ali felt
when he’d done this; there’s nothing worse than having to put your fate
in someone else’s hands.

The thrusters fired again, and the Pride began moving toward the ring.
I checked my harness to make sure it was tight, then settled back in my
seat. But just before the ship crossed the event horizon, I looked across
the bridge to where Rain was seated. She’d continued to avoid me, and al-
though our eyes met for a moment, she hastily looked away. Once again, I
wished I could talk things over with her, but now that was out of the
question. I was the pilot, and she was counting on me to get her home.

The wormhole opened. A blinding flash of light, and then we plunged
into hyperspace.

Jas kept hisher promise. When we came out the other side of the worm-
hole, we were back in the Rho Coronae Borealis system.

The second time around, though, there was nothing surprising. Jas got
on the horn and spoke with someone in hisher own language, and a few
minutes later the local traffic system took control of the ship and guided

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it the rest of the way to Talus qua’spah. I sat with my hands in my lap
and watched while the Pride entered the same saucer that had berthed
it before. Once the ship glided to a rest within the docking cradle, the
gangway arms telescoped out to mate with our airlock hatches. Ted and I
shut down the main engine and put all systems on standby, then the cap-
tain tinned to Jas.

“Right, then,” he said. “We’re back. Now what do you want us to do?”

Morgan was already unbuckling his harness. “For one, Fd like to speak
with someone about replacing my cargo. Fm not responsible for . . .”

“Remain seated, Mr. Goldstein.” Jas barely looked his way. “Our visit
will be brief, but during this time, only one individual will be allowed to
disembark.” Then hisher helmet swiveled in my direction. “Jules, please
come with me.”

As startled as I was, I couldn’t help but notice that the Prime Emissary
had addressed me by my first name. Now that was a change; no longer
was heshe calling me “Mr. Truffaut.” I was about to respond when Ted
shook his head. “Fm sorry, but no. As commanding officer, Fm the person
who speaks for the ship and her crew. If the High Council wants to meet
with anyone . . .”

“It’s okay, skipper. I can take care of myself.” Taking a deep breath, I un-
fastened my harness. “I think I know why.”

Ted hesitated, then reluctantly nodded. It only made sense that the
High Council would want to see me. After all, it was my screw-up that
had forced us to undertake the task we’d just completed, and it was also
yours truly who’d delivered the hjadd probe to Kha-Zann. If anyone was
going to answer to the Talus, it should be me. Yet I’d just pushed myself
out of my chair when Rain spoke up.

“Fm going, too.” She’d already risen from her seat and was pulling her-
self across the compartment. “I was with Jules, remember?” she added,
looking at Jas. “If they’ve got a bone to pick with him, then they’re going
to have to pick it with me as well.”

Jas’s translator must have had trouble making sense out of Rain’s col-
loquialisms — pick a bone ? whose bones '? — because a few moments went
by before the Prime Emissary made a reply. “Yes, you may join us,” heshe
said at last, hisher head swinging back and forth in the hjadd affirmative.
“However, you should be warned that, by doing so, the Council’s judgment
may be extended to you as well.”

“Rain, don’t . . .”

“Hush.” Rain gave me a stubborn look, then turned to Jas. “I under-
stand. So . . . let’s go.”

With Jas leading the way, we made our way down the access shaft to
the primary hatch, then cycled through the airlock. Jas told us we didn’t
need to put on spacesuits, and artificial gravity was restored as soon as
we entered the gangway. I was half-expecting to have to undergo decont-
amination again, but instead we went straight through the reception area
without having to stop, take off our clothes, and get another dart in the
ass. Yet when we found ourselves at the tram station, Jas stopped and
stepped back from us.

“I am leaving you now,” heshe said. “You may see me again later, but at

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this point you will travel in a different direction.” Heshe motioned to the
waiting tube car. “This will transport you to where you are supposed to
go. May fortune be with you.”

I didn’t quite know how to take this; it sounded rather ominous. As hes-
he began to turn away, though, Rain spoke up. “Just one question . . .
would you have really left us on Kha-Zann, if it had been your choice?”

The Prime Emissary halted, and hisher head swiveled around. “I was
considering the safety of the ship. You were expendable.”

There wasn’t much to say to that, really, except perhaps that I strongly
disagreed with hisher assessment of the value of our lives. I doubted that
would’ve made much difference, though, so I simply nodded, and Rain re-
luctantly did the same, and then we climbed into the car. Jas watched as
the canopy slid shut; one last glimpse of himher, standing at the platform,
and then the car shot down the tube and out into space.

Hard to believe that we were back here, and so soon. Only a few days
ago, I thought I’d seen the last of Talus qua’spah. Yet as the car hurtled
through the immense habitat, I found myself wondering whether I
should have stayed aboard ship. Sure, we’d kept our side of the bargain —
the Pride had deployed the probe and survived to tell the tale — but I
couldn’t shake the feeling that the Talus wasn’t done with us quite yet.
Only this time, I wouldn’t have Ted or Emily or Ash or even Morgan to
pull my bacon from the fire. Only Rain . . . and I couldn’t figure for the life
of me why she’d insisted on sharing the risk.

I didn’t get a chance to ask, though. The car took an abrupt right turn
and headed toward a cylinder that we hadn’t visited during our previous
trip. I’d just noticed that it didn’t have any windows when the car began
to decelerate. It entered a portal and coasted to a halt at another tram
station, and then the canopy opened.

Rain and I climbed out onto the platform and looked around. As before,
a sphincter door was recessed in the nearby wall. But this time, there was
no friendly voice to tell us what to do; the door irised open, revealing an-
other copper-paneled corridor. The message was clear: this way, and don’t
forget to wipe your feet.

“YToiow,” I murmured, “this is a bad time to know me.”

“Oh, hell, Jules . . . I’ve regretted knowing you from the moment we
met.” I glanced at her, and she softened the blow with a wink and a smile.
“Just kidding. C’mon, let’s get this over with.”

The corridor took us to another door. Upon our approach, it swirled
open, but beyond it lay only darkness. I stopped, reluctant to venture in.
Rain was just as hesitant; her hand trembled as she took mine. Then a
narrow beam of light came from a high ceiling, forming a circular spot
upon a bare floor. Again, a message that was both unspoken and clear:
come in and stand here.

Still holding hands, we entered the room. The door slid shut behind us,
and when I looked back, I found that I couldn’t see where it was. The
spot-lit circle was just large enough for the two of us. The room was cold;
when we exhaled, the light caught the fog of our breaths. It was as if we’d
entered limbo, some netherworld between one plane of reality and the
next.

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February 2008

“Okay,” Rain let go of my hand to rub her shoulders for warmth, “I
guess this is the part where the trap door opens and . .

At that instant, the whole place lit up, and we were . . .

Back on Kha-Zann.

Everything about the place was just as I had last seen it — same dark
purple sky above a barren plain; same sun hanging low upon distant
hills — yet somehow different. It took me a second to put my finger on it:
utter silence, not even the wind. Yet it was unquestionably Kha-Zann: a
ghost of a world that had recently been reduced to nothing more than de-
bris. But how. . . ?

“Jules?” Rain said.

I thought she was talking to me. But when I looked around, I saw that
we were no longer alone. A couple of feet away, a human figure wearing
EVA gear was staring straight at us. His helmet faceplate was polarized,
so I didn’t recognize him at first. Then he took a step back. And that’s
when I realized who it was.

“Good grief,” I murmured. “That’s me.”

I seemed to be watching old footage of myself, scanned two days ago
and reproduced as a hologram. Behind me was the crate I’d dragged from
the shuttle, its lid on the ground nearby, and now I could see that it was
empty. But if that were so, then where was. . . ?

Rain laughed out loud. “Oh, now I get it,” she said. “This is what the
probe saw, right after you turned it on.” She looked to the right, then
pointed to the ground beside us. “See? There it is.”

She was correct. Where our shadows should have been, instead lay the
elliptical shadow of the hjadd probe. I remembered the instruments that
emerged from the probe’s core right after it opened; as Fd figured, one of
them must have been a camera, which in turn captured ground-level images
of Kha-Zann and transmitted them via hyperlink back to Talus qua’spah.

“And there’s me.” Rain pointed to the left; about a hundred yards away
stood Loose Lucy. A tiny figure stood within the open hatch of its cargo
bay, gazing in our direction. “If I’d known what was happening,” she
added, suppressing a laugh, “I would’ve waved.”

I was still getting over the strangeness of seeing myself As I watched,
my doppelganger turned its back to us, and I knew exactly what he ... or
rather, I . . . was looking at. To the east, Kasimasta was coming into view
over the horizon, larger than when we’d seen it from space.

“Oh, look . . . there you go.” As Rain spoke, I saw myself begin to run
away, heading for the shuttle. After the first few steps, I started doing
bunny-hops, trying to make up for lost time. “Okay, now,” she said, “here it
comes . . . one, two, three ”

Everything around us suddenly blurred and jiggled, as if reality itself
had turned to gelatin. Apparently this was the moment when the first
tremor hit. Right on cue, I went sprawling face-first against the ground.
Rain laughed out loud, and I gave her a sour look.

“Not very funny” I muttered. She hadn’t realized how close Fd come to
smashing my helmet against a rock.

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“No, it really isn’t . . . sorry.” But she was amused all the same. As we
watched, I struggled back to my feet and continued running toward Lucy,
no longer performing broad-jumps but instead making an all-out dash for
the shuttle. By then the image was in constant vibration; the wind had
picked up, and Lucy was obscured by blowing sand. “Oh, c’mon,” she said.
“What’s taking you so long?”

“You try . . .” My voice trailed off as, through the windbome silt, I saw
myself climb aboard the elevator. As the cage began to make its ascent,
I could see the shuttle rocking back and forth upon its landing gear.
Even though I knew how this would turn out, my throat felt dry. Sure, it
had been a close shave . . . but until then, I hadn’t realized just how
close.

The cage reached the top, then the crane’s T-bar was withdrawn into
the cargo hold. A couple of minutes passed, then the hatch shut. At this
point, the image was shaking even more violently, but there seemed to be
a long, breathless pause to the entire scene. I waited, and waited, and
waited . . . and then, all of a sudden, there was a billowing explosion of
sand and grey smoke from beneath the shuttle.

Loose Lucy silently rose from the ground, riding atop a fiery column
that scorched the place where it had once rested. Craning our necks, we
watched the shuttle as it grew ever smaller, becoming a tiny sliver that
was soon swallowed by the dark sky. By then the tremors were continu-
ous; the shuttle had barely disappeared when the dust storm obscured
everything in sight. I caught a glimpse of the crate lid being picked up by
the wind and hurtled away, followed a second later by the crate itself
falling over on its side. And then . . .

Everything froze.

One minute, we were in the midst of a world’s dying moments. The
next, we found ourselves caught within a split-second of suspended time,
as if reality itself had come to a standstill. And at that instant, words ap-
peared in the air, holographically superimposed upon the landscape.

Impressive. Quite impressive, indeed.

The words wrapped themselves around us, forming a semicircle of
script. As we turned to read them, we discovered someone was with us.

The chaaz’braan.

XIII

The askanta holy man . . . well, holy frog . . . stood only a few feet away,
unobscured by the dust that masked everything else in sight. Obviously
another hologram: no breathing apparatus, but instead the same robes
he’d worn the first time we’d met. His heavy-lidded eyes seemed to twin-
kle with amusement as he raised a four-fingered hand from beneath his
robes, but when his thick lips moved, we saw his words instead of hearing
them.

Allow me to make us a little more comfortable.

His fingers twitched slightly, and suddenly the scene around us revert-
ed back to the way it had been a few minutes earlier. Once again, my dop-
pelganger stood nearby, caught in the act of backing away from the hjadd
probe.

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February 2008

There. That’s better.

The chaaz’braan sauntered toward my image, stopping to look at it
more closely. When he spoke, his words curled around us, forming a
ring.

This really was quite an act of courage. You could have simply

THROWN THE PROBE FROM YOUR SPACECRAFT AND LAUNCHED AGAIN, BUT
INSTEAD YOU CHOSE TO PLACE IT ON THE GROUND AND MAKE SURE THAT IT
WAS PROPERLY ACTIVATED.

“Thank you.” Rain then shook her head. “Pardon me, but I don’t under-
stand why you’re . . .” She gestured toward the holographic script, which
was already fading from sight. “Communicating with us this way, I mean.”

The chaaz’braan turned to us. Again, when his mouth moved, we heard
nothing but silence.

It is the custom of SaTong that my voice remain unheard, save

DURING RELIGOUS CEREMONIES. LIKE OTHER RACES OF THE TALUS, I
USE A TRANSLATOR. UNLIKE THEM, THOUGH, WHAT I SAY IS TRAN-
SCRIBED. SO THIS IS MY WAY OF ADDRESSING VISITORS DURING INFORMAL
OCCASIONS.

As he spoke, other figures began to materialize, forming a broad circle
that surrounded us: aliens whom we’d seen during the reception, appar-
ently representatives of the High Council. They observed our conversation
in silence; I assumed that they were also seeing what the chaaz’braan had
to say, only translated into their own languages.

“But you didn’t do that before.” I did my best to ignore our audience. “I
mean, when we were at the reception.”

Saliva drooled from the chaaz’braan’s fleshy mouth as it spread a broad
smile.

You didn’t give me a chance. That’s understandable, considering

THAT YOU WERE NOT IN A SOBER STATE OF MIND. OTHERWISE, WE MIGHT
HAVE HAD A PLEASANT DISCUSSION.

Again, he turned toward my image. It seemed as if he was studying it
with admiration.

This truly is amazing. Such courage is rare among intelligent
races. Particularly the hjadd, who seldom take risks. At least

NOT IF THEY CAN GET SOMEONE ELSE TO DO IT FOR THEM.

“So you’re satisfied that we’ve done what you asked us to do?” Rain had
noticed the other aliens as well, but she kept her attention on the
chaaz’braan.

You’ve performed an immense service to the Talus. The probe
didn’t survive very long, but while it did, data was gathered that

WILL BE INVALUABLE TO OUR SCIENTISTS. In TIME, IT MAY EVENTUALLY
HELP US DEVISE THE MEANS BY WHICH TO DESTROY KASEMASTA.

“Destroy a black hole?” I shook my head. “That’s . . . I’m sorry, but that’s
impossible.”

The chaaz’braan regarded me with what seemed to be condescension.
Nothing is impossible. Once your kind becomes more sophisti-
cated, YOU WILL LEARN THIS. PERHAPS AS YOU INTERACT WITH OTHER
RACES OF THE GALAXY.

“Then I take it that we’ve fulfilled our obligation.” I let out my breath. “I

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didn’t have a chance to say so myself, but I’m very sorry that I offended
you. We will try not to do so again.”

It was only a misunderstanding. You were not informed of the

PRACTICES AND CUSTOMS OF SaTONG. THE GOD THAT IS YOU WELL KNOW
BETTER NEXT TIME.

The god that is you? “What do you mean by that?”

SaTong holds that there is no god except those which we cre-
ate ourselves. Therefore, if you have created a god, then you

YOURSELF ARE A GOD, AND THEREFORE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN
ACTIONS.

I nodded. Made sense, although I imagined that a few theologians
among my own kind would argue with it. Before I could say anything,
though, my image faded away, and the chaaz’braan spoke again.

Be that as it may, you must know that, before your kind is al-
lowed to join the Talus, there are other obligations we may wish

FOR YOU TO FULFILL.

“Other obligations?” I stared at him. “What do you mean?”

As I said, you have demonstrated a certain fortitude that is

RARELY SEEN. TfflS WILL BE USEFUL TO US. So BEFORE YOUR RACE IS AD-
MITTED into the Talus, you will be given other tasks that we wish

TO HAVE PERFORMED ON OUR BEHALF.

“No.” I shook my head. “Sorry, but . . . no.”

Rain looked around at me, her mouth falling open in astonishment.
And indeed, I almost regretted my words even as I spoke them. After all,
you don’t tell the great galactic frog to go jump a lily pad.

But I knew where this was going to lead. One day, it was risking life
and limb to place a probe in the path of a rogue black hole. The next . . .
well, what then? Dive a ship into the heart of a supernova to see if we’d
get burned? Take on a race of killer tomatoes? Maybe Goldstein would as-
sent to all this in hopes of getting a good deal for his next shipment of
cannabis, but I wasn’t about to let humankind become the crash test
dummies of the galaxy.

“Look,” I went on, “we’ve kept our side of the bargain . . . and believe me
when I tell you that we thought we were going to die doing it. But it’s
done, and that’s it. No more.”

The chaaz’braan’s eyes narrowed.

You don’t have a choice.

“Oh, yes, we do.” Sucking up my courage, I took a step toward him. “We
can go back to where we came from, and never have anything to do with
you again. Nice to make your acquaintance, but . . . well, if you think
we’re going to be your cabana boys from now on, then think again.”

From the comer of my eye, I could see the members of the High Coun-
cil turning toward one another. We couldn’t hear what they were saying,
but I had little doubt that I’d ruffled fur, feathers, scales, or whatever else
they had on them.

“Jules . . .” Rain whispered. “What are you. . . ?”

I ignored her. Too late to back down now. And damn it, it was time to
take a stand.

“We are what we are,” I went on. “Perhaps we’re not as mature as you’d

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February 2008

like us to be. Maybe we’re going to make mistakes. I know I have, and my
friends have had to pay for me being a fool. But you’re just going to have
to accept that and cut us some slack.”

I paused, then shook my head. “But no more conditions. No more jobs.
Period.”

The chaaz’braan said nothing. For several seconds, the air around us
remained clear, vacant of floating words. He stared at me for a long time,
the wattles of his thick neck trembling with what I assumed was irrita-
tion. Around us, the other aliens continued to talk among themselves.
Hard not to figure out what they were saying: who the hell does he think
he is?

I stole a glance at Rain. Her face had gone pale, but she nodded in qui-
et agreement. Fd just drawn a line in the sand; now we would have to see
whether they would cross it. At last, the chaaz’braan spoke.

YOU MAY RETURN TO YOUR WORLD. WE WILL BE CONTACTING YOU SOON
WITH OUR DECISION.

And then, without so much as a farewell, he faded from sight. An in-
stant later, the other aliens vanished.

The room went dark, save for the shaft of light in which Rain and I
once again found ourselves. The door through which we’d entered swirled
open, revealing the corridor beyond. Neither of us said anything as we
left the room, but as the door shut behind us, she let out her breath.

“So — ” she hesitated “ — what do we tell the others?”

I shrugged. “We tell ’em we can go home. After that ... I don’t know.”

TWENTY

Home run ... a sudden Rain . . . key to the galaxy . . . the narrative
ends.

T xsv

hree days later, I was sitting in the bleachers of University Field,
watching the Battling Boids thump the Fighting Swampers.

The Boids had gotten a little better since the last time I’d seen them . . .
which seemed like a lifetime ago, although it had only been a week. Ei-
ther that, or I’d become a little more forgiving; when the Boid pitcher al-
lowed a Swamper to slide into first on a bunt, I wasn’t cursing the way I
once might have. Perhaps I’d grown up a bit. Or maybe it was simply be-
cause, once you’ve been halfway across the galaxy and back again, it’s
hard to take baseball seriously any more.

Indeed, ever since my return from Rho Coronae Borealis, it had been
hard for me to get back into the habits of my old fife. Ash was right; now
that I’d seen the Great Beyond, nothing was the same again. Oh, I still
had my room at the Soldier’s Joy, and the previous night I’d trooped over
to Lew’s Cantina and put away a few pints of ale . . . but when I’d finally
left the bar, Fd found myself standing in the middle of the street, staring
up at the night sky. Somewhere out there were countless worlds whose

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inhabitants were waiting for humankind to join them. What’s beer and
baseball compared to that?

But it was more than that. I was alone.

Rain wasn’t with me.

When the Pride of Cucamonga finally made the jump back to 47 Ursae
Majoris, hardly anyone took notice of our return. I wasn’t expecting a pa-
rade, mind you, but it was still disappointing to find that no one paid at-
tention to the fact that we’d just completed a journey of more than four
hundred and fourteen light-years. Indeed, we practically limped home;
there was barely enough fuel left in the tank to get us there from the star-
bridge, and a shuttle had to be sent up from New Brighton to meet us
once the ship settled into orbit above Coyote. As the shuttle detached
from the docking collar, I caught one last glimpse of the Pride through the
window beside my seat. Before we’d left, she had merely been a beat-up
old freighter. Now, with her cargo modules gone, her shuttle missing, and
her hull plates pitted, warped, and scorched, she looked like a candidate
for the junkyard.

Nonetheless, she’d brought us safely home. No one said anything as the
shuttle peeled away, but I couldn’t help but notice Emily rubbing the cor-
ners of her eyes, or the way Doc gnawed at his lower lip. I think everyone
was saying farewell in his or her own silent way.

We touched down in New Brighton, and it was there that we saw the
last of Morgan Goldstein and Mahamatasja Jas Sa-Fhadda. Once Rain
and I returned to the Pride after our meeting with the chaaz’braan, I was
surprised to learn that Jas had already come back aboard and pro-
grammed the coordinates for 47 Uma into the nav system. After that, the
Prime Emissary spent the rest of the trip in hisher cabin; when the shut-
tle landed, Morgan escorted himher to a waiting hovercoupe, and the two
of them departed without so much as a goodbye, leaving the rest of us to
catch the afternoon gyrobus to New Florida. Hell, we even had to pay the
fare ourselves.

Not that our merry band had much left to say to one another. Perhaps
it’s uncharitable to say it, but we were sick and tired of each other. It had
been a long and exhausting journey, and I think all of us were just happy
to get home alive. So the ride to Liberty was made in near silence, and
once we got there we all pretty much went our own separate ways. Ted
and Emily caught a shag wagon to their house, Doc escorted Ah to the
hospital for further treatment, Ash lurched off to the nearest watering
hole, and Rain and I . . .

Ah, but that’s a different story, isn’t it?

Sure, we went back to the Soldier’s Joy together. That’s where we’d left
our belongings; for me, it was the only home I’d known, at least on Coy-
ote. But if Fd had any notions that Rain and I would consummate our ro-
mance with a playful romp in bed, I was sadly mistaken. Once we re-
trieved our room keys from the front desk, Rain gave me a quick buss on
the cheek and said that she’d see me later. Since the landlady was giv-
ing us the eye, I figured this would be a bad time to push the issue. Be-
sides, I was dead tired; all I wanted to do in bed just then was study my
eyelids.

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February 2008

So I went up to my room and rediscovered the subtle charm of being
able to sleep on a mattress. Eight hours in the hay, followed by a hot
shower and a change of clothes, put me in a better frame of mind. The sun
had risen on a new day, and I figured that the proper thing to do was to
find Rain and buy her breakfast. And while we were at it, perhaps we’d
figure out what to do next.

Yes, well . . . maybe that’s the way things should have gone. But it wasn’t
the way it went.

When I knocked on her door, there was no answer, and when I
checked the dining room, I saw only a handful of strangers. I was about
to go back to her room and try again when the innkeeper spotted me
crossing the lobby. Was I looking for my lady friend? Sorry, sir, but she’d
checked out earlier that morning . . . and no, she hadn’t left a forward-
ing address.

And that was it. She was gone.

So there I was, watching a baseball game and trying not to feel like a
guy whose heart had just been carved from his chest and handed to him,
when someone sat down on the bench next to me. I looked around, and
saw that it was Rain.

“Hi,” she said. “Miss me?”

“Umm . . .” About a half-dozen possible responses flashed through my
mind, some more heated than others. I settled for the simplest and least
angry. “Yeah, I did. Where have you been?”

“Away.” She wore a homespun hemp sweater and a long cotton skirt,
and it was the first time in awhile that Fd seen her in anything that wasn’t
suitable for space travel; the change was nice. Aware that her reply didn’t
explain much, she went on. “I needed to get away for a bit, think things
over. So I went to stay with my aunt and uncle, and now . . .”

A crack of a bat, and we looked up in time to see a Boid send a fly ball
into center field. The Swamper outfielders scrambled to retrieve it, but
they recovered too late to prevent the batter from making it safely to first
or the guy on second to grab third. The crowd around us clapped and
shouted, save for the handful of Swamper fans who scowled at another
lousy defensive play by their team.

“So you’re back,” I said, once everyone had settled down again. “Did you
... I mean, have you worked things out?”

Rain didn’t say anything for a moment. She sat next to me, arms
propped on her knees, a smile on her face that was both warm and cau-
tious. “What about you? I see you’ve still got a room at the inn ... or at
least you did when I checked a little while ago.”

That must have been how she’d found me; Fd mentioned to the landlady
that I was planning to go to the ball game. “Yeah, Fm still there. Right af-
ter you left, Morgan sent over his man Kennedy with a check for what he
owed me. Not much, but enough to pay the rent,” I shrugged. “Or at least
until the proctors haul me off to the stockade.”

“They won’t.” She shook her head. “Whatever else happens, that’s not
something you have to worry about any more.”

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She said this with such confidence that I forgot about the game. “How
do you know?”

“Umm . . .” Rain hesitated. “I told you I went to stay with my aunt and
uncle, right?” I nodded. “And you know, of course, that my family is pretty
well connected?”

I recalled my argument with Ted, shortly before the Pride set out for
Rho Coronae Borealis, during which he’d quietly let me know that Rain’s
family owned the Thompson Wood Company. I hadn’t thought much
about it since then, but now . . . “Yeah, I know that.”

“But I bet you don’t know just how well-connected they are.” Moving a
little closer, she dropped her voice so that she wouldn’t be overheard.
“Ever heard of Carlos Montero? Or Wendy Gunther?”

I hadn’t been on Coyote long enough to learn all of its history, but even
so, those were names that even people on Earth recognized. “Sure. Origi-
nal colonists. Led the Revolution. Went on to become presidents of the
Coyote Federation, one after the other. Why do you. . . ?”

My voice trailed off as I suddenly realized what she was saying. Before
I could do much more than turn my mouth into a bug trap, she gave me a
solemn nod.

“Uh-huh. My mother is Carlos’s younger sister. She married into the
Thompson family, which makes Hawk and me . . .” Realizing that she was
about to mention her brother again, she stopped herself. “Anyway, they’re
my aunt and uncle. Surprised?”

“Yes.” That was all I could manage at the moment.

“Thought you might be. At any rate . . .” Rain folded her hands together
in the lap of her skirt. “While I was staying with them, I told them all
about you, and how Morgan tried to screw you out of the deal you guys
made. Now, even though Uncle Carlos also happens to be one of Janus’s
major investors, he’s also learned not to trust Morgan very much. And if
there’s anyone in Liberty with more clout than Morgan Goldstein, it’s my
uncle.”

“So what does this. . . ?”

“Mean?” A sly smile. “To make a long story short, this morning he met
with the chief magistrate, and over coffee he managed to persuade her to
drop all charges against you. Not only that, but your plea for political
amnesty is being — ” a sly wink “ — considered. But since you’ve got him on
your side, Fd say it’s a safe bet.”

I let out my breath, shut my eyes. For a few moments, I didn’t know
how to respond. Rain must have sensed this, because she took my hand.
“It’s okay” she murmured. “All you have to do is say, Thank you, Rain.’ ”

“Thank you, Rain.” Then I looked at her again. “Do you know just how
much I. . . ?”

“I’m not done yet.”

Down in the batter’s box, a Boid finally struck out, ending the fifth in-
ning. I wasn’t paying much attention to the game anymore. “There’s
more?”

“Uh-huh.” Rain gently removed her hand from mine. “Speaking of Mor-
gan . . .”

“Oh, crap. Here it comes.” I shook my head. “He’s not very happy with

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125

February 2008

me, yTtnow. Not after I dumped his cargo. And I can’t imagine he’s going
to be very pleased about . .

“He’s not, but that doesn’t matter anymore.” She hesitated. “He knows
about what happened back there. On Talus qua’spah, I mean.”

I stared at her. We’d been careful not to reveal the details of our en-
counter with the chaaz’braan and the Talus High Council, other than to
tell the rest of the crew that we’d met our obligation and we had been giv-
en permission to return to Coyote. “You didn’t tell him ... I mean, about
what I said to. . . ?”

“I didn’t, no . . . but he learned that for himself. From Jas .” Another
pause. “That’s the other reason I’m here. Heshe called me last night, and
told me that heshe wants to see you.”

“Jas?” I asked, and she nodded. “When? Now?”

“Uh-huh. Now.” She glanced at the field. “Unless, of course, you’d rather
wait until this is over.”

It was at the top of the sixth, with the Boids leading the Swampers 5-2.
I figured my team could get along without me, so I stood up. “No sense in
keeping himher waiting,” I said, offering her my hand. “Let’s go.”

XVI

We climbed down from the bleachers and left the field, then walked
across the university campus until we reached the low hill overlooking
the hjadd embassy. An ironic moment; it was at this very same spot that
Morgan had told me how he’d wanted to gain access to their technology.
In only a week or so, I’d come full circle.

I thought Rain was going to take me the rest of the way to the com-
pound, but instead she stopped and took a seat on the wooden bench be-
neath the trees. Puzzled, I was about to ask her why, when she looked
past me and nodded. I looked around as two familiar figures emerged
from the shadows behind a tree.

Jas, once again wearing his environment suit. And with him, Ash.

I couldn’t say which of them I was more surprised to see. The hjadd sel-
dom left their embassy. Not only that, but judging from his steady gait, I
could tell that Ash was stone sober.

“No, I haven’t been drinking.” As usual, Ash was one thought ahead of
me. “To tell the truth, I haven’t touched a drop since ...” A sheepish grin
from within his hood. “Well, since the bender I had right after we got
back.”

Two days. For him, that was something of a record. “I’ve been wonder-
ing why I haven’t heard from you . . . your guitar, that is. You’re not at the
inn anymore?”

“Checked out the next morning, after I spent the night in an alley.” He
reached up to pull back his hood. “YTuiow, every now and then, an alco-
holic receives a moment of clarity when you come to realize that, if you
don’t stop drinking, you’re going to die. I think I had my moment while
we were out there . . . just took a little while for it to sink in, that’s all.”

“So you’re on the wagon?” I asked, and he nodded. “Good for you.”

“Well . . .” Ash glanced at Jas. “I’m getting a little help from a friend.”

“Mr. Ash is working for us now.” Jas’s voice purred from the grille of

126

Allen M. Steele

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hisher suit. “The High Council has reached its decision, so we will need
someone to act as an intermediary. I have offered him that position, on
the stipulation that he discontinue his alcohol abuse.”

“SaTong is an interesting religion . . . well, it’s not really a religion, or
at least not as we know it. However you want to call it, though, it has
some neat tricks for learning mental discipline.” Ash paused. “I’m not
over it yet, but I’m getting there.”

“Well, that’s ...” I suddenly realized what Jas had just said. “Whoa,
wait a second . . . what’s that about the Talus?”

Jas moved a little closer, until I could see my reflection in the faceplate
of his helmet. “Upon the recommendation of the chaaz’braan, the High
Council has decided to invite humankind to join the Talus, provided that
your race accepts and agrees to abide by its rules. Even as we speak, the
hjadd embassy is sending a formal communique to the Coyote Federa-
tion, requesting a meeting in which we may negotiate trade and cultural
exchanges.”

For a moment, I was unable to speak. Feeling my knees giving way be-
neath me, I hobbled over to the bench. “Easy, now,” Rain murmured,
reaching up to help me find a seat. “Deep breaths . . . thataboy . . .”

“I thought ... I thought . . .” For the second time in the last hour, I didn’t
know quite what to say. I took Rain’s advice, and once my head stopped
spinning, I tried again. “I thought the chaaz’braan . . . well, that I’d blown
it.”

“Blown it?” Jas’s helmet cocked to one side. “I fail to understand.”

“That I’d said too much. Or said the wrong thing.”

“No. What you said to the chaaz’braan and the High Council was cor-
rect. Humankind has the right to exist on its own terms, without being
subservient to others. Your race has met its obligations. There will be no
others.”

“In other words, they’ve decided to trust us.” Rain smiled at me.

“She’s right.” Ash nodded. “I’ve heard about what you said to them.
They didn’t like hearing it, but it went a long way toward redeeming us.”
Another pause. “That took a lot of guts, man . . . but it paid off.”

Now that was a lot to absorb. At the very least, it wasn’t what I’d expect-
ed to hear. Another deep breath, then I sat up a little straighten “So . . . well,
that’s great. Glad to hear everything’s going to work out for the . . .”

“I have not yet finished.” Jas held up a hand. “Once the Talus has com-
pleted negotiations with your race, the hjadd will resume trade with Coy-
ote. Morgan Goldstein has already expressed his desire to continue trans-
porting consumer goods to Talus qua’spah, although I understand that he
wants a more equitable arrangement.”

I couldn’t help but grin. Couldn’t blame Morgan for desiring something
more useful than two thousand paperweights. And if I never saw another
gnosh again, it would be too soon. “Sounds reasonable. Of course, he’s go-
ing to have to get another ship.”

Rain nodded. “Another ship, yeah . . . the Pride is pretty much shot.
Doc’s gone back up there to see what can be salvaged before she’s scuttled.”

I grimaced. That wouldn’t be a pleasant task; the Pride was Doc’s ship,
and she’d brought us home alive. Maybe Morgan didn’t consider it cost-

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127

February 2008

effective to have her refitted again, but it would still be painful for Doc to
let her go. “I hope he doesn’t plan to retire after this,” I said. “He’s a good
man.”

“I hope not either. I’d like to work with him again.” Rain hesitated. “I
hope you will, too . . . once we get the new ship.”

“Huh?” I gave her a sharp look. “But Morgan . . .”

“Morgan fired you, yes . . . and now he wants to rehire you.” She
shrugged. “Or maybe he just decided not to fire you in the first place. At
any rate, I’ve been told to tell you that he’d like to offer you a permanent
contract, once the new ship is delivered .”

“Same job?”

“No.” She smiled at me again. “This time, you’ve got the helm . . . unless,
of course, you’d really rather be a shuttle jockey.” She paused, then quiet-
ly added, “Don’t say no. Please.”

I wasn’t about to refuse, even if it meant having Morgan as my boss
again. “I take it that Ted and Emily still have their jobs, too,” I asked, and
she nodded. “And you?”

“The only person who isn’t being offered a contract renewal is Ah,” Ash
said. “Or at least not until he learns to manage his temper a little better.”

“Do I assume correctly that you are willing to accept this position?” Jas
stepped toward me. “Or should I wait until you’ve made a final decision?”

I didn’t reply at once. Instead, I looked at Rain. She said nothing, but
something in her eyes told me she’d make it worthwhile. And I still had a
room at the inn . . .

“Sure. I’m in.” I grinned. “Why not?”

She moved closer to me. Before I knew what was happening, she’d giv-
en me a kiss. For someone whom I’d once considered a prude, she knew
how to do that pretty damn well. I was about to put my arms around her
when Ash cleared his throat. Damn telepath. I was about to tell him to
get out of my head and go take a cold shower when I felt something prod
my shoulder. Looking around, I saw what it was.

A hjadd navigation key. Jas held out hisher hand and offered it to me.

“You will need this,” heshe said.

All this happened many years ago. I was a younger man then, imma-
ture and a little too full of myself. Looking back at it now, I realize that
perhaps there were things I should have done in a different way. On the
other hand, if I hadn’t been so young and stupid, would I have been so for-
tunate to be where I am now?

I don’t know. Perhaps it’s human nature to second-guess ourselves.
What I do know is that I’ve got a woman who loves me, a ship to fly, and
the key to the galaxy. We’ve been out here for quite a while, and there are
still plenty of stars left for us to see.

And I also know Ash was right. If all you want is a normal life, then it
takes nothing to stay home. But once you’ve been to the Great Beyond,
nothing is ever the same again.

Trust me.

Trust yourself. O

128

Allen M. Steele

CHESS PEOPLE

If chess people were
the world, everything
would be checkered.

We would ride checkered
cabs down checkered
streets to arrive at our
checkered assignations.

Maps of our cities
would be truly rectilinear,
numbered and lettered so
there would be no mistakes.

According to your stature,
you could only travel
such rigid grids
in prescribed fashion.

If chess people were
the world, we would be
forever trying to mate
one another with logic
and spurious device,
winning and losing
or calling it a draw.

Some women would be queens
both swift and extreme
in their power.

Certain men, in kingly repose,
would expect nothing less
than royal dedication.

Most of us would be pawns,
immured in the fray,
with slight hope
of transformation.

Each of us searching
for that perfect combination.

ON BOOHS

Paul Di Filippo

Introduction

H lthough each of these fine small-
press volumes could support my
usual interminable exegesis at
greater lengths than they’re giv-
en here, I feel that even just a short,
sharp, sincere boost is valuable for
alerting you to their existence, and
allows me to spread the press-cover-
age wealth, such as it is, amongst as
many titles as possible. So without
further ado . . .

Poetry

The preponderance of the poems in
G. O. Clark’s 25$ Rocket Ship to the
Stars (Dark Regions Press, chapbook,
$6.95, 50 pages, ISBN 978-1-888993-
43-1) concern themselves with astro-
nomical tropes: abandoned patio fur-
niture on the Moon; an enigmatic
celestial smile that frustrates tele-
scopes; Spot the Dog, of children’s
book fame, orbiting the Earth. As
such, these poems read like enchant-
ing, nostalgic fables of the Space Age.
And every now and then, Clark toss-
es in a surreal bombshell like “Sun-
day at the Virtual Beach,” with its
“honeybees with the facial features of
cherubs,” just to loft your pleasures to
a new realm of imagination.

A very handsome cover and interior
illos by Matt Taggart are the icing on
the tasty cake that is Corrine De Win-
ter’s demi-gothic Tango in the Ninth
Circle (Dark Regions Press, chapbook,
$6.95, 43 pages, ISBN 1-888993-12-1).
De Winter’s poems are like Tori

Amos’s songs: piercing, melancholy,
reflective; unlike Amos, De Winter
relies fruitfully on the supernatural
as metaphor and talisman. She
namechecks Leonard Cohen in “En-
ter Valentine” and that old bard’s
mournful yet hopeful and rumina-
tive tone is another apt comparison.
In a poem like “The Body in Love,” De
Winter perfectly fuses the corporeal
limitations and exaltations of our
material forms with the spiritual
longings and imaginings of our souls.

Darrell Schweitzer is surely
“tetched” in the head. I mean this in
the most complimentary manner.
Only one who had slept too long out-
side under the full moon and basked
in infernal influences could have
written The Arkham Alphabet Book
(Zadok Allen: Publisher, chapbook,
$4.00, 28 pages, ISBN unavailable).
This is a Lovecraftian primer that
lurches grimly and gleefiilly through
the alphabet of madness, each page
illumined in ghastly fashion by Allen
Koszowski. If you wish to raise your
children as anything other than fod-
der for the return of the Old Ones,
send your useless human money to
Darrell at 6644 Rutland Street,
Philadelphia, PA 19149.

Readers of this magazine will cer-
tainly recall Bruce Boston’s excel-
lent poem “Heavy Weather,” which
took an Asimov’s Readers’ Award for
2005. It’s to be found nowadays in
Shades Fantastic (Gromagon Press,
chapbook, $6.95, 50 pages, ISBN 0-
9776665-3-0), along with a wealth of
other rich material, including sever-
al hitherto-unpublished items. Only

130

Asimov's

from the mind of Boston could we
learn, for instance, that the dogs of
Atlantis have stolen their barks
“from the heady dialogues of Philoso-
pher-Kings.” Such startling imagery,
as well as keen observations of life,
loss, and love, are delivered in suc-
cinct and meaty lines. Like the multi-
farious women who fill “Visions of the
Blue Clone,” Boston’s poems are easy
to embrace and never twice the same.

Somewhat similar to Bruce Bos-
ton’s sensibilities, but with threads of
Steve Aylett’s gonzoness, we discover
Jason Christie with his i-ROBOT Po-
etry (EDGE, trade paper, $19.95, 112
pages, ISBN 978-1-894063-24-1). To-
gether, these scores of poems build
up a surreal cybernetic future where
the problems of machine intelligence
assume positively Asimovian dimen-
sions. A poem like “Merciless,” with
its presentation of a suffering robot
who wishes nothing more than the
release of sleep, expertly walks the
tightrope between pathos and senti-
mentality. Whether full narratives
(“Everybody Do the Robot”) or only
composed of single lines (“Robota!”:
“Was the holographic turkey hot-
looking enough when we had our
paid friends over for a pretend din-
ner party on act-like-a-human day”),
Christie’s poems achieve startling
insights into non-human humanity.

Fittingly enough, given its title,
Bobbi Sinha-Morley’s mammoth
compilation, Songs of a Sorceress
(Cambridge Books, trade paperback,
$15.95, 328 pages, ISBN 1-59431-
319-9) is suffused with powerful
women. Dryads, goddesses, nymphs,
mothers, sorceresses, of course, and
many other emblematic females.
They move through quiet moments
and epic trials of courage with equal
grace. Sinha-Morley favors very
short lines, which gives her poems
an incantatory edge. She blends

Wiccan, Greek, Hindu, and Native
American religious motifs into a lu-
minescent theology of the individual
questing soul. I particularly enjoyed
her “Cafe” poems, in which fanciful
menus of wonders are evoked. From
“At the Silver Creek Cafe”: “where
autumn/comes in a jar/and sarsa-
parilla is/served in a stein.”

Nonfiction

Anything connected with the enig-
matic and perilous SF writer named
Jeff Lint (see Steve Aylett’s Lint
[2005] for a biographical map of the
crime scene) is subject to ambiguity.
But I think that I can safely report
this much: with And Your Point Is?
(Raw Dog Screaming Press, trade
paperback, $10.95, 109 pages, ISBN
978-933293-17-2), Steve Aylett has
assembled a “Lint Companion,” so to
speak, that is fit to five on in infamy
next to Lint’s own mighty non-linear
screeds. These mini-essays explicat-
ing “Scorn & Meaning in Jeff Lint’s
fiction” all bear the true and accu-
rate stamp of gleeful derangement
so characteristic of Lint the man,
Lint the books, and Lint the monster
from the fourth dimension.

The newish firm of Payseur &
Schmidt specializes in books that
are also limited-run and signed art
objects. But this is not to say these
publishers neglect content. Far from
it! Their recent offering should prove
just how invalid such a notion is.
John Clute’s lexicon of critical terms
for the horror field, The Darkening
Garden (hardcover, $45.00, 162
pages, ISBN 978-0-9789114-0-9) has
enough intellectual heft to make
your brain expand like the Scare-
crow’s once Oz rewarded him. Trans-
lating his “four season” schematic
for fantasy novels to a similar cir-

0n Books

131

February 2008

cuitry for horror novels, Clute im-
poses brilliant rigor on a sprawling
canon, and illuminates its darkest
comers. Also, check out the accom-
panying postcard set done by thirty
very talented artists.

Anyone lucky enough to have
heard John Crowley read aloud — or
actually, even those who have intuit-
ed his mesmeric natural speaking
voice from his fine fictions — will
once more hear his distinctive tones
and will encounter the same mix of
keen intelligence, quirky affections
and wry wisdom that they have
come to expect from the man in per-
son through the pages of In Other
Words (Subterranean Press, hard-
cover, $35.00, 206 pages, ISBN 1-
59606-062-X), a collection of his non-
fiction. Whether writing about the
craft of writing, the deep structures
of narrative, or simply (never sim-
ply!) reviewing novels and nonfic-
tions, Crowley’s essays convey his
perpetual fascination with and
amazement at the “labyrinth of the
world and the paradise of the heart.”
Just the piece on Walt Kelly’s Pogo
alone is worth the cost of this vol-
ume.

With his new book of essays, Full
Metal Apache: Transactions Be-
tweeen Cyberpunk Japan and
Auant-Pop America (Duke Universi-
ty Press, trade paper, $22.95, 272
pages, ISBN 0-8223-3774-6), Japan-
ese master critic Takayuki Tatsumi
provides an invaluable window into
the complex cross-cultural flow of
ideas between two countries ar-
guably at the bleeding edge of futur-
ism and SF. Not only will the lucky
reader be exposed to a myriad
Japanese works of fabulism proba-
bly little known to most of us West-
erners — such as Shozo Numa’s
Yapoo the Human Cattle (1956-
1999) and Kunio Yanagita’s Tono

Monogatari (1910) — but that reader
will have his head rewired in terms
of understanding literary land-
marks of the English language, such
as Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland
(1990). And all of this will be accom-
plished through Tatsumi’s spark-
filled, spunky, spontaneous bop
prosody.

Just as rude and graphically as-
saultive as any classic punk fanzine,
but infinitely more sophisticated, Jon
Farmer’s Sieg Heil, Iconographers
(Savoy Books, trade paper, £25.00,
608 pages, ISBN 0861301161) con-
tinues — after D.M. Mitchell’s A Seri-
ous Life (2004) — to tell the history of
Britton & Butterworth’s Savoy em-
pire. More a survey of the personali-
ties and individual publishing land-
marks than a linear chronicle, the
book makes a bold case for locating
Savoy closer to the heart of SF pub-
lishing than the fringes. With
Michael Moorcock looming like a de-
ity over the whole thirty years of the
scandalous firm, Farmer paints a vi-
brant picture of a cabal of free-
speech-crazed creators delivering
harsh truths.

Mark Finn, biographer, is, in his lit-
erary fashion, as large a hero as Co-
nan, the most famous creation of
Robert E. Howard, who happens to be
the subject of Blood & Thunder
(Monkey Brain Books, trade paper,
$15.95, 272 pages, ISBN 1-932265-
21-X). Battling manfully through the
hordes of lies and legends surround-
ing REH, Finn delivers a clear-eyed,
sympathetic yet objective portrait of
this seminal writer. Depicting the
man, his place and times, and his sto-
ry-telling accomplishments vividly
and discerningly, Finn shows that
journalistic accuracy is actually more
powerful than sleazy mythologizing.
This book will be enjoyed by veteran
fan and newbie alike.

Asimov's

Novels and Novellas

Remember Harvey comics? Casper,
Hot Stuff, Richie Rich, et al.? There’s
something about Richard Sala’s flu-
id linework that evokes those icons
for me, without precisely resembling
them. The teenage villain in his lat-
est graphic novel, The Grave Rob-
ber’s Daughter (Fantagraphics, trade
paperback, $9.95, 96 pages, ISBN
978-1-56097-773-5) reminds me of
Little Audrey’s pal Melvin, gone bad.
Of course, Sala does not purvey the
wholesome saccharine sweetness of
Baby Huey and company, but rather
the wonderfully twisted perversity
of a Charles Burns. When Nancy-
Drew-alike Judy Drood ends up in
the deserted town of Obidiah’s Glen,
she encounters enough sacrilegious
shenanigans to satisfy any lover of
the supernatural. Judy’s main assets
are a foul temper and a mean right
hook. She’s my kind of girl sleuth.

If Mickey Spillane had collaborat-
ed with both Fred Pohl and Phil
Dick, he might have produced Bruce
Golden’s Better Than Chocolate (Zu-
maya Publications, trade paperback,
$15.99, 292 pages, ISBN 978-1-
934135-46-4). In the middle of the
twenty-first century, Inspector Noah
Dane of the San Francisco police has
to overcome the replacement of his
murdered partner with a “celebu-
droid” in the form of Marilyn Mon-
roe, while dealing with his runaway
daughter and the machinations of
aliens known as “Trolls.” And how
does “America’s favorite virgin,” me-
dia superstar Chastity Blume, fit
into the picture? You’ll only learn by
racing gleefully through gonzo chap-
ters with such titles as “Bubble
Gum, Bug Poison, and the Spiritual-
ity of Key Lime Pie.”

Jonathan Lethem, in his cogent
introduction to the latest reprinting

of John Franklin Bardin’s cult clas-
sic, The Deadly Percheron (Millipede
Press, trade paperback, $15.00, 224
pages, ISBN 1-933618-10-8), beauti-
fully establishes the “amnesia novel”
lineage of this fiendishly clever and
surreal psychological mystery. I’ll
simply add that it’s the best Un-
known-style novel never to appear
in Unknown, and that if Preston
Sturges and David Lynch ever had
the chance to collaborate, this would
be the project for them. Dr. George
Matthews, psychiatrist, runs afoul of
a patient with delusions of lep-
rechauns, and is swiftly drawn into
a murderous scheme that results in
Phildickian identity shifts. Add in
some Ashcan Realism, and you get a
novel that’s at once a perfect expres-
sion of its period, and also eternally
weird.

There’s a ghost at the center of Tim
Powers’s novella A Soul in a Bottle
(Subterranean, hardcover, $22.00, 82
pages, ISBN 1-59606-075-1), but to
reveal this much is not to spoil any-
thing, since the reader learns early
on the truth about the mysterious
woman met by the loner protagonist
outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater.
The secrets and surprises come hot
and heavy (this is an erotic tale, af-
ter all) in her identity, how she died,
and what she wants. Powers, as ever,
writes with imm ense sensitivity, del-
icacy, and immediacy. The poignancy
of this tale rivals Robert Nathan’s
Portrait of Jennie (1940). Additional-
ly, killer artwork from J.K. Potter
syncs perfectly with the text.

Some of the same karmic impulse
that must have motivated Heinlein
to write Stranger in a Strange Land
(1961) seems to have lodged in the
breast of John Shirley, because his
new novel, The Other End (Cemetery
Dance, hardcover, $40.00, 292 pages,
ISBN 1-58767-150-6), at times recalls

On Books

133

February 2008

that earlier classic: higher-level con-
sciousness erupts into the fallen hu-
man sphere, and radicalizes exis-
tence. But at the same time, given
Shirley’s political bent, there’s an-
other explicit motivation for his nov-
el: offering a counterweight to the
smarmy success of the Left Behind
series. In any case, what we have
here is a bang-up apocalypse told
from “the other end of the philosoph-
ical spectrum,” as Shirley declares in
his “Author’s Note.” And a fine book
it is. Following a large cast of charac-
ters — most notably, reporter Jim
Swift and his family — Shirley de-
tails the three phases of human
transcendence and judgment that
follow on the heels of the arrival of
messengers from the Absolute. Deft-
ly weaving Gnosticism and science
together, Shirley dares to make the
unimaginable concrete, depicting
the ineffable and summoning up
genuine visions of the laws of the
universe above morality. One char-
acter describes his epiphany as
“something painful and powerful
and gorgeous at once,” and that’s an
apt description of this novel as well.

Single-author Collections

Spilt Milk Press shows the world
how to produce an attractive chap-
book. The Sense of Falling ($5.00, 62
pages, ISBN unavailable), consisting
of stories by Ezra Pines, features
handsome design; an introduction
by an author with a certain level of
name recognition (Hal Duncan);
some original stories as well as
reprints; clear copyright acknowl-
edgements for nerdy bibliographers
such as I; attractive interior art by
Mark Rich; and an author’s After-
word. But of course all this would
avail naught if not for the magnifi-

cence of the fiction herein. Pines
writes like an R.A. Lafferty raised
on a diet of the TV show Lost and
the prose of Andre Breton. His “Mr.
Brain” sequence of stories is hilari-
ous, while his other pieces are dis-
turbingly surreal, yet emotionally
close to the bone. The unstable na-
ture of reality is Pines’s theme in all
cases, and seldom has a sense of
falling felt so right.

Just as impressive as the Pines vol-
ume is Show and Tell and Other Sto-
ries (Tropism Press, chapbook, $6.00,
56 pages, ISBN unavailable), contain-
ing six marvelous tales by Greg van
Eekhout (with the author’s own il-
los!), plus his informative notes. Van
Eekhout’s language is zestily inven-
tive, his story premises splendidly
wacky, and his execution flawless.
Whether he features Santa Claus as
an end-times superhero a la Captain
Future (“In the Late December”) or
posthuman school kids striving for a
good grade (the title story), he can be
counted on to amaze, entertain, and
illuminate the sapient condition.

If you crossed Franz Kafka with
Thomas Ligotti and Warren Ellis —
well, you’d be one sick puppy. But the
result might be Rhys Hughes — at
least in his particular authorial incar-
nation on display in At the Molehills
of Madness (Pendragon Press, trade
paperback, £7.99, 187 pages, ISBN 0-
9538598-8-6). This volume assembles
all of Hughes’s horror or dark fantasy
stories, and a splendidly scabrous
and scaly and squamous lot they are.
As Hughes explains in his “Pompous
Afterword,” this type of fiction is (or
should be) a window into the neu-
roses of the author. Hughes has the
courage of his convictions, and the tal-
ent to bring it all off Just check out,
for instance, “The Crippled Gollywog’s
Fox Hunt,” which rakes the British
upper classes over surreal coals.

134

Paul Di Filippo

Asimov's

Glen Hirshberg has immense
range, sharp chops, an assured voice
and vision. What more could you
want from a short-story writer? He
can do an over-the-top performance
like “Safety Clowns,” about drug
dealers hidden in ice-cream trucks;
or an atmospheric historical saga
like “Devil’s Smile,” focused on new
England maritime mysteries; or a
Bradbury-style piece about a broth-
er and sister dealing with the death
of their beloved grandfather, as in
“The Muldoon .” Ail these Guises of
Glen, and others, are on display in
American Morons (Earthling Publi-
cations, hardcover, $24.00, 191
pages, ISBN 0-9766339-8-1). You’d
practically deserve the book’s title if
you didn’t check it out.

Anthologies

The four editors who have assem-
bled The James Tip tree Award An-
thology 3 (Tachyon, trade paperback,
$14.95, 276 pages, ISBN 1-892391-41-
4) — Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy,
Debbie Notkin, and Jeffrey D. Smith
— wisely do not feel constrained by
mere calendar years in assembling
relevant stories and non-fiction.
Thus, while we do indeed get to see
the most recent prizewinners, we
are also treated to such timeless
goodies as Tiptree’s own “The Girl
Who Was Plugged In,” and a 1990
essay by Dorothy Allison on Octavia
Butler. The mix of old and new
serves well the cause of highlighting
gender issues in our field, and how
it’s been a long hard slog from days
of willful ignorance and exclusion
about such matters to a relatively
enlightened present. Let a thousand
bake sales bloom!

It’s been much too long since the
world has been graced by new fiction

from Rachel Pollack, and we have ed-
itors Richard Labonte and Lawrence
Schimel to thank for the latest such
eruption, to be found in the pages of
their new anthology, The Future Is
Queer (Arsenal Pulp Press, trade pa-
perback, $17.95, 213 pages, ISBN
978-155152-209-8). Pollack’s primo
story, “The Beatrix Gates,” about an
alchemical, transexual future, is the
standout in my eyes. But every con-
tributor here has intriguing things
to say on the theme of differently
gendered, differently sexed worlds.
Writers such as Candas Jane Dorsey
and L. Timmel Duchamp prove that
any future worth living in, whatever
its failures or successes, must be
open to all persuasions.

Can one generalize usefully about
the Polyphony series from Wheat-
land Press, assembled by Deborah
Layne and Jay Lake, now that we’ve
reached Polyphony 6 (trade paper,
$18.95, 350 pages, ISBN 0-9755903-
4-0)? I think so. First off it’s safe to
say that they’ve lived up to the
“many-voiced” promise of their name.
This newest installment, like its pre-
decessors, does not impose any ideo-
logical or formalistic party lines, but
rather accepts all modes of fabulist
fiction. You get pure SF, as in Richard
Wadholm’s “Orange Groves Out to
the Horizon,” Lovecraftian pastiche,
as in Robert Freeman Wexler’s “The
Adventures of Philip Schuyler and
the Dapper Marionette in the City of
the Limbless Octopi,” surreal good-
ness, as in Ray Vukcevich’s “The Li-
brary of Pi,” experimental New Wave
montage, as in Forrest Aguirre’s
“Keys I Don’t Remember,” and so
forth, through another dozen schools.
Additionally, while all the authors
and editors are plainly serious about
the value of their stories, there’s no
literary pomposity or solemnity
here. These writers believe in fiction

On Books

135

February 2008

as ludic enlightenment. And finally,
the editors do not run a closed shop.
Veterans (Barry Malzberg, Jack
Dann, Howard Waldrop, et al ) con-
sort happily with newcomers (Anna
Tambour, Darin C. Bradley, Hannah
Wolf Bowen, and others). Put all
these generalizations together, and
you’ve got one enticing salon.

New Imprint, New Writer, New
Thrills

It’s always a grand moment when a
major new line of SF/F/H books pre-
mieres, and our field, rather mar-
velously, has recently experienced it
twice. There’s the USA branch of the
UK’s long-running Orbit line, and
well be encountering their offerings
in later columns. Also originating in
the UK, and distributed maximally in
the USA, is Solaris, under the veiy ca-
pable hands of editor George Mann.

And one of the first volumes from
Solaris consists of a debut novel.
Now, that’s leading with confidence
and brio and forward-thinkingness.

Thief with No Shadow (mass-mar-
ket paperback, $7.99, 463 pages,
ISBN 978-1-84416-469-1) by Emily
Gee is, within the tight parameters
it sets itself, a highly accomphshed
work, rewarding on any number of
levels. It’s a fable of sorts, almost
something by the Brothers Grimm.
As such, it shares affinities with
work by Jane Yolen and Patricia
McKillip. What it does not do is to
build the typical extended subcre-
ation of a Tolkienesque fantasy (and
that’s actually kinda refreshing).
The world Gee sketches out is just
dense enough not to put your foot
through its scrim as you speed excit-
edly down the taut tightrope of plot.
A name or two of a king and a king-
dom. A sketched-in town. Some exot-

ic sentients to rival humans. A little
bit of countryside. A couple of tales-
within-the-tale as cultural touch-
stones. And a single mundane
household that constitutes about 75
percent of what we see. Out of these
components, Gee succeeds in fash-
ioning a melodrama (in the best
sense of the word) of sacrifice and
redemption.

Our four main protagonists are
two brother-sister pairings. Melke
and Hantje are wraiths, humans
possessed of the power to go “un-
seen” by others. Many wraiths natu-
rally turn their talent for invisibility
toward a life of crime. Melke and
Hantje have higher moral standards.
But, forced to flee to a strange land
by political persecution, they reluc-
tantly in their poverty detour to
thieving. Their clumsy initial foray —
Hantje’s idea, really — goes dreadful-
ly wrong when Hantje is captured
by salamanders. (There are four su-
pernatural races besides man: sala-
manders, lamias, gryphons, and
psaarons, corresponding to fire,
earth, air and water.) To rescue Han-
tje, Melke must steal a unique magi-
cal necklace from Bastian and Liana
sal Vere, the scions of a cursed es-
tate. Bastian has the power of con-
versing with dogs (his own dog En-
dal is one of the brightest lights in
the book), while Liana is a healer.

Now the fates of the magical four-
some are inextricably bound togeth-
er by the thefts. Melke and Hantje
end up on the ruined farm of the sal
Veres, and the quartet undergo
shifting balances and counterbal-
ances of emotions, interspersed with
bouts of danger.

Gee’s schema for her tale, con-
sciously or not, almost perfectly mir-
rors John Clute’s famous stage-by-
stage progress of the Ur-fantasy as
“an earned passage from bondage.”

136

Paul Di Filippo

Asimov's

As such, Gee’s novel possesses a rich
share of archetypical power. Al-
though one might question whether
the plethora of domestic scenes
could have been trimmed a bit to
avoid some small repetitiveness.

Her language is sharp and colorful,
subtly shifting depending on whether
Melke or Bastian hold the reins of
POV. Her subplot in the village of
Thierry proves to be integral to the
main thread. And her depiction of
the alien races is nicely otherworld-
ly and erotically spooky, a la Yeats. It
should also perhaps be mentioned
that Gee inverts the standard
damsel-under-threat-of-rape sce-
nario in inventive ways, without be-
ing programmatic or tendentious.

Gee’s first novel offers lots of pure
fairytale resonance, and portends
much fine work to come.

The Sleeper at the Heart of the
World

Haruki Murakami resembles no
other creator possibly more than he
resembles filmmaker David Lynch.
Both men delight in the surreal, in
bizarre pattemings and weird sym-
bols whose meanings linger on the
edge of vocalizing, in depicting exis-
tential life-or-death quandaries, in
walking the edge between innocence
and perversity.

But in his newest novel, After Dark
(Knopf, hardcover, $22.95, 191 pages,
ISBN 978-0-3072-6583-8), I believe
Murakami is paying homage to a dif-

ferent filmmaker and to one of that
director’s more anomalous offerings:
namely, Martin Scorsese and his
1985 film After Hours. Aside from the
unmistakable similarity of titles, the
action is just too kindred to be coinci-
dental. Whereas in Scorsese’s film,
Griffin Dunne found himself em-
barked on a screwball nocturnal
odyssey across SoHo, New York, in
Murakami’s book we find our charac-
ters swept up in a similar round of
events in urban Japan. Perhaps a tad
less slapstick and extroverted, and
more sober and internalized — but
kissing-cousin journeys nonetheless.

Mari, our heroine, is a shy, quiet
nineteen-year-old student living
with her parents. But this particular
evening (the action of the book occu-
pies a mere eight hours, each short
chapter cued to a certain interval)
she feels the overwhelming urge to
escape for a time from a certain set
of circumstances at home. So she re-
solves to spend the night awake, sit-
ting in fast-food joints, reading. Un-
fortunately, she picks a rather rough
neighborhood to frequent. There she
meets a friendly, good-hearted musi-
cian named Takahashi. Her casual
instant involvement with him sweeps
her up in a sordid situation at a love
hotel named Alphaville. The night
will spool out from there, and we
will ultimately get the sense that all
the events cosmically revolve around
Mari’s sister, Eri, who has undertak-
en a vow to sleep indefinitely until
her unstated problems are solved.

Eri proves to be rather like a cer-

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On Books

137

February 2008

tain Dunsany figure: “The chief of
the gods of Pegana is Mana-Yood-
Sushai, who created the other gods
and then fell asleep; when he wakes,
he ‘will make again new gods and
other worlds, and will destroy the
gods whom he hath made.’” Muraka-
mi slips back and forth across planes
of existence, in classic butterfly-or-
philosopher mode, employing the
tactic of a nameless, first-person,
bodiless narrator.

As always, Murakami’s prose
stylings and vocabulary (as ably
translated by Jay Rubin) are ex-
tremely primal and spare, yet some-
how cohering into subtle and color-
ful and beautiful cadenzas. He’s the
ultimate global cosmopolitan, in
that his characters partake of a
world-spanning set of touchstones.
And yet there’s something undeni-
ably Asian and Japanese about his
work — how could there not be?

Murakami specializes in pulling
the rug out from under any sense of
certainty his characters long for —
and out from under the reader as
well. As a character named Korogi
observes, “The ground we stand on
looks solid enough, but if something
happens it can drop out right from
under you. And once that happens,
you’ve had it: things’ll never be the
same. All you can do is go on living
alone down there in the darkness.”
(Recall that one of Murakami’s most
famous protagonists spent plenty of
time literally immured in a well!)
This is the most pessimistic formu-
lation of Murakami’s thesis, and
Mari rightfully rejects Korogi’s
words to some degree. Mostly, this
sense of unpredictability instead
brings a kind of deliciously scary joy
to his characters, who might often be
stuck in a rut anyhow. If you survive
your trials, you’ll emerge somehow
richer, even ennobled.

The French pioneered this kind of
“anti-novel” half a century ago. (Mu-
rakami makes the tie explicit with
“Alphaville” and a Godard refer-
ence.) Brian Aldiss did an SF one
with Report on Probability A (1968).
But Murakami imbues his books
with less of the clinical and more of
the humanistic. They’re tender med-
itations on the impossibility and ut-
ter necessity of being human.

The Artist and the Writer Were
Lovers

The history of genre literature in
the twentieth century needs to be
docrmented even more extensively
than it has been (and the semi-ne-
glected visual aspect of the field
even more so than the bibliographic
side). The people who lived it, who
contributed to it, are all mortal, and
slipping away fast — as the obituar-
ies in Locus and Ansible remind us
every month. Much fascinating ma-
terial about the larger-than-life
characters who built the field of fan-
tastical literature we all love is on
the point of vanishing.

With this goal in mind, author Luis
Ortiz has succeeded admirably in
chronicling one of the more historical-
ly important and still vital careers —
actually, joint careers — in the field,
that of Ed and Carol Emshwiller.
The main focus in Emshwiller: In-
finity X Two (Nonstop Press, hard-
cover, $39.95, 173 pages, ISBN 978-
1-933065-08-3) is on polymath Ed,
his paintings and films, but Carol’s
life as a writer is treated in honor-
able and comprehensive fashion as
well. The loving synergy that was
their marriage assumes almost the
role of a third character in the biog-
raphy.

Primarily, fans today know and re-

Paul Di Filippo

138

Asimov's

vere “Emsh” for his magazine and
book illustrations, and this aspect of
his career receives top billing and
the largest amount of space. Printed
on nice rich stock, the cleverly ar-
rayed reproductions of Emsh’s mar-
velous paintings leap off the page,
conveying just what a unique vision-
ary he was, and how his work helped
codify the look and feel of modern
SF. Ortiz’s capsule descriptions of
the paintings capture their most in-
timate craftsmanly and thematic se-
crets. Moreover, Emsh’s non-SF art
in the mystery and men’s mags out-
lets gets a good airing as well.

But Ed Emshwiller eventually
came to see himself essentially as a
creator of films, and Ortiz docu-
ments Emsh’s progress in this arena
with lots of verve and insight. This
part will be a revelation to most
readers. And, as I mentioned above,
Carol’s arc of literary self-discovery,
and her co-creative support for her
husband, emerge in tandem with
the main arguments.

Ortiz superbly evokes the van-
ished era of the fifties and sixties,
arguably Emsh’s heyday. He places
Emsh’s work into context with other
leading artists of the time such as
Richard Powers. And he conveys the
struggles of a pair of creators who
never had much regard for social
conventions or riches, without either
romanticizing or downplaying their
chosen lifestyle.

This book is a model of the vibrant
narrative scholarship the field needs.

Cellulose in His Veins

An early example of such scholar-
ship is Ron Goulart’s classic survey,
Cheap Thrills, originally published
in 1972, when studies of pulp litera-
ture constituted but a fraction of

what we have today. The book was a
landmark, due to Goulart’s exten-
sive primary reading among the
many genres of pulp magazines, his
affectionate tone, and his first-hand
research conducted with the sur-
vivors of that milieu. He paved the
way for later scholars.

Does his book hold up today? We
have the chance to find out, thanks
to Hermes Press, which has just
reissued a splendid oversized hard-
cover reprint ($49.99, 208 pages,
ISBN 1-932563-75-X).

Visually, the book still delivers
plenty of thrills. The covers that
Goulart chose to reproduce are real
winners, and not often duplicated in
later volumes. (Oh, sure, there’s
some overlap, but you can never look
at some of these specimens often
enough.) The stock and reproduction
is top-notch too. My one beef? No
artist credits! It’s an affront to these
painters, and would have been quite
easy to remedy.

The text, at this late date, is not
going to deliver any major surprises.
Although Goulart does manage to
provide a tidbit or two I had not en-
countered before. I never knew, for
instance, that Doc Savage’s early ap-
pearance was based on Clark Gable’s.
But additionally, and more vitally,
we get Goulart’s analysis of societal
trends, marketplace conditions, lit-
erary fads and fashions, and a host
of other pertinent matters. These in-
sights remain exemplary.

Lastly, the final section of the book
reproduces correspondence that
Goulart received from various pulp-
sters during his researches. Seeing
these typed letters from the late six-
ties, with their strikeovers and
penned corrections, is now almost
akin to examining the pulps them-
selves: an exercise in nostalgia and
melancholy and joy.

On Books

139

February 2008

Zeno Has the Answers?

Is philosophy a science? It’s a dis-
cipline, certainly, and much good SF
has been written to examine philo-
sophical questions, mainly in the ar-
eas of ontology and epistemology.
Where would PKD be, for instance, if
he couldn’t play out his thought ex-
periments on the nature of reality?

In any case, I probably shouldn’t
push too hard to label Paul Horn-
schemeier’s The Three Paradoxes
(Fantagraphics, hardcover, $14.95,
80 pages, ISBN 978-1-56097-653-0)
as SF, since that’s likely a betrayal of
its real nature as autobiography.
Still, it does deal in a genuine specu-
lative manner with Zeno’s famous
three paradoxes involving motion
and change, as exemplified in some
lived-in historical moments from the
life of its narrator.

We encounter young Chicago
artist Paul as he’s visiting his par-
ents in his childhood town in Ohio.
He struggles with a graphic novel
story he’s currently composing; he
takes a walk with his father; he has
flashbacks to his childhood; then he
drives away when his visit is over, to
meet a woman he’s never before
seen in the flesh. A simple enough
arc, but one that becomes dense
with interplay between memory and
consciousness, illustrating the muta-
ble nature of reality.

Homschemeier’s masterstroke in
the telling of this tale involves his for-
malistic gameplaying. There are five
modes or visual styles on display
here, all superbly rendered. Predomi-
nant is the naturalistic mode that’s
used for the realtime parts, reminis-
cent a bit of Dan Clowes’s work. Then
there’s the naked, cartoony pencils of
the graphic novel in progress. There’s
some Dennis the Menace- style art
for one flashback thread. There’s a

kind of early-sixties romance comic
or EC comics look for another flash-
back. And finally, we travel back to
the philosophers of ancient Greece
via a kind of Peanuts blended with
Classics Illustrated format.

These mixed media, so to speak,
convey the varying levels of reality,
which begin to bleed into one anoth-
er, especially when the Dennis- type
characters are seen in the back-
ground of a naturalistic panel. Such
a formalistic achievement conveys
thematic points in ways more sub-
tle — and, paradoxically, more force-
ful — than most strictly textual ma-
terial could.

As Jonathan Lethem says in his
blurb for this neat book, there’s no ul-
timate resolution of all these matters.
But simply watching the heretofore
hidden machinery of the cosmos and
consciousness in action through one
man’s life is reward enough.

Dark Companion

Another volume at hand is both au-
tobiography and more than autobiog-
raphy. In fact, with Dark Reflections
(Carroll & Graf, trade paperback,
$15.95, 295 pages, ISBN 978-0-78671-
947-1), our old pal Samuel Delany,
proving himself still an innovator af-
ter such a long and illustrious ca-
reer, seems to have invented a new
format entirely: call it “counterfactu-
al autobiography” if you will.

What precisely do I mean by this?

Well, first consider counterfactual
fiction, or uchronias, or alternate
histories, as we commonly know
them in the genre. They are thought
experiments designed to highlight
how subtle (or major) alterations in
recorded consensus events can lead
to strange and different and unex-
pected outcomes.

140

Paul Di Filippo

Asimov's

In this book, Delany has done a
counterfactual run on his own life.

Here’s a quick snapshot of the pro-
tagonist of Dark Reflections, Arnold
Hawley: he’s a gay black man, a poet,
who teaches on the side. He lives in
a book-cluttered, rent-controlled
apartment in New York City. His
aunt is a charismatic, educated fig-
ure in his life. He had a brief mar-
riage to a young woman when he too
was young, followed by a nervous
breakdown. He’s won an award or
two, and has a good critical reputa-
tion, but his work is considered
rather abstruse.

Wow, you think, that’s pretty close
to Delanos C.V. This is going to be a
novelized version of Chip’s actual
autobiography, The Motion of Light
in Water (1988). But you couldn’t be
more wrong.

For despite the surface affinities,
Hawley is almost the anti-Delany.
(He’s the “dark reflection” of the au-
thor, although the multivalent title
here also refers to one of Hawley’s
own books.) And his life’s story, told
in exquisite and aching detail,
serves to illuminate both Delany’s
own career and vast sociocultural-
political wavefronts.

Bom five years prior to Delany, in
1937 versus 1942, Hawley is just old-
er enough to be stuck in the binding
mentality of the closeted gay man.
And his natural temperament rein-
forces this isolation. Timid, fearful,
full of misinformation, Hawley never
embraces his sexuality. Instead, he
buries his passion, deliberately
killing it and sublimating it after
some hasty, botched experiments.

And esthetically speaking, Hawley
is no innovator like Delany. He’s
rather stodgy and traditional in his
writing, his likes and dislikes, his lit-
erary heroes. But he does proudly em-
brace the African-American experi-

ence in American literature, and thus
his stifled, less-than-ideal career will
serve as a useful vessel for Delany’s
history of change in the field, how
cultural attitudes have progressed
over the latter half of the twentieth
century and into the new one.

And although there is nothing
overtly fantastical about this book,
this very impulse of examining so-
ciopolitical trends and paradigm
shifts through representative char-
acters is SF’s core methodology.

But let me also be clear on this: the
main thrust here is toward a portrait
of Hawley and those in his sphere,
and Delany does a superb job limning
a writer’s marginal life. One might
think of Saul Bellow or Philip Roth or
John Updike — if one didn’t know that
Delany himself has done this task
ably time and again, only in more
fantastical settings. Another fruitful
comparison is John Crowley’s The
Translator (2002), which likewise
evokes a vanished era.

Delany’s writing retains its im-
maculate sheen when it comes to de-
picting action, texture, physical real-
ity. Hawley might be a failed poet to
some extent, in the world’s eyes, but
he still possesses a poet’s sharp per-
ceptions, and Delany crystallizes
Hawley’s vision for us with precise
and robust language.

This book supplements Delany’s
previous assessments of contempo-
rary society through a most unlikely
messenger — one who comes fully
alive even though he is living a buried
life.

By the way: Carroll & Graf itself is
now a dead imprint, abandoned in
the wake of various corporate merg-
ers. It would be a shame if Delany’s
book got lost in these maneuvers, and
I suspect that this edition will soon be
very collectible. For all those reasons
and more, you need to grab a copy. O

On Books

141

SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR

W inter is a great time for indoor weekends with other SF enthusiasts, especially in northern areas.
Plan now for social weekends with your favorite SF authors, editors, artists, and fellow fans. For an
explanation of con(ventk>n)s, a sample of SF folksongs, and info on fanzines and clubs, send me an
SASE (self- addressed, stamped #10 [business] envelope) at 10 Hill #22-L, Newark NJ 071 02. The
hot line is (973) 242-5999. If a machine answers (with a list of the week’s cons), leave a message and I’ll
call back on my nickel. When writing cons, send an SASE. For free listings, tell me of your con 5 months
out. Look for me at cons behind the Filthy Pierre badge, playing a musical keyboard.— Erwin S. Strauss

JANUARY 2008

4-6-GAFHk. For info, write: 890-F Atlanta #150, Roswell GA 30075. Or phone: (973) 242-5999 (10 am to 10 pm, not collect).
(Web) gafilk.org. (E-mail) Mo@gafHk.org. Con will be held in: Atlanta GA (if city omitted, same as in address) at a venue to
be announced. Guests will include: none announced. Filk (science fiction & fantasy folksinging).

1 8-20— ConFusion, Box 8284, Ann Arbor Ml 48107. stilyagi.org. Marriott, Troy Ml. Westerield, Larbalestier, Scalzi.

18-20— RustyCoa mstycon.com. Airport Radsson. General SF & fantasy convention.

18-20— MarsCon, 4618 Okie Stone Way, Chesapeake VA 23321. marscon.net Williamsburg VA

18-21— Arista, Bldg. 600, #322, 1 Kendall Sq, Cambridge AAA 02139. arisia.org. Cambridge MA L. Gilman, Marrus.
25-27— VeriCon, HRSFA, 4 Univ. Hall, Cambridge AAA 0213a vericon.org. Harvard Univ. Lois Lcwry, S. November.
25-27— ConFlikt www.confliM.org. Flenton WA Steve MacDonald, Arlene (Callie) Hills. SF and fantasy fbiksinging.

FEBRUARY 2008

1-0— COSIne, do 1245 Allegheny Dr., Colorado Springs CO 80919. firstfridayfandom.org M. Resnick. SF/Fantasy.
8-10— CapriCon, capricom.org Sheraton, Arlington Heights (Chicago) IL.

8-1 0— OwICon. owlcon.com. Held at Rice University in Houston TX. For fans of gaming, fantasy and science fiction.
8-10— IlddCon, Box 1641, Bastrop TX 78602. ikldcon.com. Austin TX. Japanese pop^ulture and animation convention.
15-17— Boskone, Box 809, Framingham MA 01701. (617) 625-2311. boskone.org. Westin Waterfront, Boston MA SF.
15-17— Farpoint, 11 708 Troy Ct, W aldorf MD 20601. farpoi rtt.com. M arriott, Hunt Valley (Baltimore) MD.Trek, etc.
15-17— VisionCon, Box 1415, Springfield MO 65801. (417) 886-7219. visioncon.net.

15-17 — KatsuCon, Box 79, Clarksville MD 21029. katsucon.org Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington DC. Anime/manga.
22-24— SheVaCon, Box 416, Verona VA 24482. shevacon.org. Holiday Inn Tanglewood, Roanoke VA Joe Keener.
22-24— Con DFW, 750 S. Main #14, Keller TX 76248. www.condfw.org. Dallas TX. General SF & fantasy convention.
22-24— ConNooga. connooga.com Chattanooga Choo Choo Hotel, Chattanooga TN. A “multi-genre” convention.

MARCH 2008

7-9— PortmeirCon, 871 Clover Dr., N. Wales PA 19454. portmeiricon.com. Portmeirion, UK. “The Prisoner’ TV show.
14-16— LunaCon, Box 432, Bronx NY 10465. lunacon.org Hilton, Rye NY (near NYC). Carey, Klukas, Sidari, Hewlett.
14-16— StellarCon, Box F-4, EUC, do UNCG, Greensboro NC 27413. stellarcon.org. Radisson, High Ftoint NC.

1 4-1 6— MillenniCon, 5818 Wil m. Pike #122, C enter ville OH 45459. (513) 65 9-2558. millennicon.org. Cincinnati OH.
14—16 — OmegaCon. omegacon.com. Birmingham AL Ben Bova, Alan Dean Foster, David Drake, Stephen Brust.
14-16— RevelCon, do Box 130602, Houston TX 77219. severatonlimited.conVrevelcon. lew-key relax-a-con.

20-23— NorwesCon, Box 68547, Seattle WA 98168. (206) 270-7850. norwescon.org Seattle WA D. Simmons, Ciruelo.

6-1 0— Anticipation, CP 1 05, Atontreal QE H4A 3P4. anticipationsf.ca. Gaiman, Hartwell, Doherty. WoridCon. US$1 50.

Advertise in the world's leading science fiction magazines with our Asimov's/Analog combined
classified section. Ad rates per issue: $2.95 per word (10 word minimum), $125 per column inch (2.25
inch maximum). SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY OFFER: Buy two ads and receive a third ad FREE. Send
orders to: Dell Magazines, Classified Department 475 Park Ave. S., 1 1th Floor, New York, NY 10016.
Direct inquires to: (212) 686-7188; Fax (212) 686-7414 or email: adsales@dellmagazines.com

BOOKS/PUBLICATIONS BOOKS/PUBLICATIONS

BUYING SCIENCE FICTION magazines, book
collections. Will travel for large accumulations.
Bowman, Box 167, Carmel, IN 46082.

ENEMY MINE, All books in print Check:
www.barrylongyear.net

DREADNOUGHT: INVASION SIX by Richard
F. Roszko. Existence to extinction is one short
trip. New SF Adventure comic! See sample
pages! Buy at dreadnoughtseries.com!

PUBLISH YOUR BOOK ONLINE, Third
Millennium Publishing, a cooperative
of online writers and resources,
http://3mpub.com

SCIENCE FICTION STORIES. For further
information, call 514-739-2435.

Like Analog? Discuss, rate, and create
a list of your favorite stories at
http://scifidb.org. Contact analog@g42.org
to discuss the site.

FOUNTAIN OF ECSTASY, a fast-paced spiritu-
al suspense science fiction novel that evokes
the sinewy plot of The Da Vinci Code.
See: www.fountain-of-ecstasy.com

The Sense of Falling - Ezra Pines
Ha) Duncan - intro
Mark Rich - art
US orders $5

vww.electricvelodpecle.com

ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION

Classified Department 475 Park Ave South, 11th Floor New York, NY 10016
Call: (212) 686-7188 Fax: (212) 686-7414 adsales@dellmagazines.com

CLASSIFIED

NEXT ISSUE

MARCH

ISSUE

ALSO

MARCH

In our lead story for March, popular and prolific UK writer Brian
Stableford returns to the near-future setting of stories like “Hot Blood”
with another carefully plotted and chilling example of the possible
effects advanced biotech might have on humanity. In “Following the
Pharmers,” the biotech can be as subtle as a flower’s perfume on the
wind, yet still be insidiously harmful to humans exposed to the scent.
It’s an exciting and compulsively readable story, though we at Asimov’s
earnestly hope this kind of future remains wholly fictitious!

Marching on, we find Cat Rambo, prolific semi-prozine contributor and
up-and-coming talent, making her Asimov's debut with a charming and
funny tale about an intergalactic shopkeeper who finds all four of his
hands full as “Kallakak’s Cousins” descend upon his threatened liveli-
hood; Elizabeth Bear joins us again with an unsettling Lovecraft-
inspired tale called “Shoggoths in Bloom,” in which the words “sty-
gian,” “Cyclopian,” and “shambling” are not used (we promise!); Ian
Creasey plumbs the darker side of life when a loved one is lost for good
in “This Is How It Feels”; Tom Purdom, whose “The Mists of Time” was
one of our most popular stories with readers last year, returns with the
exciting science-fiction adventure, complete with swashbuckling aug-
mented humans, “Sepoy Fidelities”; Sue Burke, whose name ought to
be familiar to fans of the poetry in Asimov's, makes her short fiction
debut here with “Spiders,” a poetic and evocative tale of familial rela-
tionships on a recently colonized world; and Carol Emshwiller returns
in an American gothic style, with a tale of strange nomadic beings
somehow both human and inhuman and their search for a permanent
home — a home that can be found only by “The Master of the Road to
Nowhere”!

OUR

EXCITING

FEATURES

COMING

SOON

In his “Reflections” column, Robert Silverberg trawls online flea-mar-
kets seeking peculiar “Space Junk for Sale”; James Patrick Kelly
examines a mysterious sub-genre of SF called “Mundane” in On the
Net; Peter Heck brings you “On Books”; plus an array of pleasant poet-
ry by many of your favorite poets. Look for our March issue at your
newsstand on January 29, 2008. Or you can subscribe to Asimov’s—
by mail or online, in varying formats, including downloadable forms,
by going to our website, (www.asimovs.com ) — and make sure that
you don’t miss any of the great stuff we have coming up!

brain-balming stories by Kate Wilhelm, Barry B. Longyear, Ian R.
MacLeod, S.P. Somtow, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Neal Barrett, Jr., Kij
Johnson, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Nancy Kress, Steven Utley,
Catherine Wells, Jack Skillingstead, Robert Reed, and many others!

The continuing
voyages of the \
Starship TITAN...

Orisha is a world
on the edge of
reason. Its people
live in fear of a
mysterious celestial
object looming
over them in their
sky, an object
which studies them...
judges them...
and perhaps waits
to destroy them.

www.simonsays.com

www.startrek.com

Also available as an eBook.

Published by Pocket Books
A Division of Simon & Schuster
A CBS Company

STAR TREK

inside, Bonus diagrams of the o

►

MrsiilR

™, ®, & © 2007 CBS. Studios Inc. STAR TREK and Related Marks are —
trademarks of CBS Studios Inc. CBS and the CBS EYE logo are trademarks "
of CBS. Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. Also available

I NTRODUC I N6

TO LIVE

WITHOUT WARNING

A new novel by Timothy LaBadie

Visit the web site for a chance to win a book or $ 1000 !

www.tolivewithoutwarning.com

To Live Without Warning is a

story set in a future San
Francisco, where public
transportation is the only way
to travel, and people with
colds are required by machines
called breathe-eraters to wear
masks. Within this speculative
fiction novel, there are aliens
who disguise themselves as
homeless people, and there
are twins from an alien
abduction, one human, one
not, plus a virtual couple who
live in a bungalow on a beach
in a virtual Costa Rica who mix
up their computer code to
have a virtual child, and then
there is a cat woman who can
do all sorts of erotica with her
tail, and a drummer who leads
more than a band called
Death, Ax and Grind.

For information on ordering this new book, visit www.tolivewithoutwarning.com

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